this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
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Tor relays only relay the traffic, they don't store anything (other than HSDirs, but that's miniscule). Session relays have to store all the messages, pictures, files until the user comes online and retrieves them. Obviously all that data would be too much to store on every single node, so instead it is spread across only 5-7 nodes at a time. If all of those nodes ware to go offline at the same time, messages would be lost, so there has to be some mechanism that discourages taking nodes offline without giving a notice period to the network. Without the staking mechanism, an attacker could spin up a bunch of nodes and then take them all down for relatively cheap, and leave users' messages undelivered. It also incentivizes honest operators to ensure their node's reliability and rewards them for it, which, even if you run your node purely for altruistic reasons, is always a nice bonus, so I don't really see any downside to it, especially since the end user doesn't need to interact with it at all.
Where does the reward come from?
Who pays the node maintainers for keeping stable nodes online?
Inflation, those are new tokens generated by the network, the same way new bitcoin is generated by the miners roughly every 10 minutes, just without the proof of work mining part. It's called proof of stake, ethereum uses it as well.
Okay, does this use a common crypto currency, or how do the node owners "profit" from upholding the service?
If it has its own cryptocurrency, where can they spend it?
It uses it's own crypto. It's not really a crypto -currency- in the sense that it's meant to be used for payment or to store value. It's more of a crypto -token- that's meant to provide some limited utility in it's ecosystem. Like an arcade token in an arcade, you can use it to play the games but that's about it. Likewise the session token can be used to get some extra functionality within the network, like registering custom names on it's dns like service that can be used to add new contacts instead of the long default user hash or as a stake if you want to run a node. The functionality is fairly limited right now but the devs plan to expand it soon. People also sometimes use these kind of tokens as a stock of sorts, so if the service/network becomes popular the value of it's "stock" can grow so it can be used as an investment (personally I wouldn't recommend that but whatever floats your boat [not a financial advice btw]). The node operators profit from selling these tokens to whomever wants to buy them.
Hey, thank you for providing actually informative answers to the other guy's questions. It was interesting for me to read as well.
I looked into running a node, but apparently the required amount of tokens to stake is over 1000 euros. I'll have to pass for now.
No problem, glad I could be of use.
You can bring down the stake amount to 6250 tokens (~300€) by running a multi-contributor node link, but your cut of the rewards will be proportionally smaller as well.
I2P already did that with their DHT network (remember DHT?). I2P Bote uses that for messaging
Eh, no. A DHT doesn't solve offline storage of data, when the source node is already offline, and the target node is not yet online.
It does temporarily, on the order of hours to days. It's not designed to use the network for long term storage, just message passing
No, DHT is just a way of determining paths and priority of value lookup by key in the network, so that the load were distributed predictably, while allowing you to find, well, what you are looking for. BTW, while everybody uses Kademlia with modifications, I'd argue that Chord is better for anything related to security and anonymity.
Storage and serving of anything big is another thing. I take it you mean that I2P nodes cache messages relayed via them when the target node is unavailable. That doesn't have anything to do with DHT.
I2P has its own internal DHT network. Bote piggybacks on it to relay messages between Bote nodes. You can even configure it so you can address random online nodes and ask them to hold a message for another node to relay (online or offline) to obscure message timing
DHT can be used for almost anything as a generic key value store, even if the typical use is just peer finding
https://bote.readthedocs.io/en/latest/v5/kademlia/
Ye-es, but wouldn't that be kinda slow?
Correct, and slow is kinda the point (traffic metadata protection through timing obfuscation)
There's even a setting to set multiple Bote hops (inside I2P which already use multiple hop tunnels) with random delay per node (up to 24h)
OK, I really love I2P, just wish sometimes there would be ways to use it with latency and throughput approaching clearnet. I like that it's a platform solving the P2P and discovery problems for everyone in the same way and providing interfaces for that, but the privacy and security orientation means that it's mostly used for privacy and security (even pedo filesharing doesn't seem to be too many people).
Can't really do that with volunteer nodes only in open networks. Reliable low latency anonymous connections require stable direct links between most nodes. Like you'd need a bunch of big universities to run it.
@Natanael@infosec.pub @vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org this concept sounds familiar…
What you are saying is create our own internet for messaging…
Well, you could make your own overlay network, maybe make use of cjdns or something like it
yet they couldve done this with volunteer nodes or even their own, because not even the server knows the content, right?