Tor competitors - Orchid Protocol, Mainframe, Obsidian, Skrumble, Dusk, Marconi, Loki, Nym

Anyone any information or opinion on any of them?


https://mainframe.com



https://skrumble.network
https://skrumble.network/whitepapers/



None of them are without blockchain/payment as a component. I haven’t seen any serious names or backing from the privacy research community working on them. One of them is a straight-up Freenet rip-off except requiring payment to do similar things.

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All of them are Vaporware, these are again just another way to sell useless tokens.
There is no need for these shitcoins, since they don’t add anything to the space except PR Bullshit.

No sane Person would build something as stupid as these People, unless you want to scam a greater Fool to buy into it.

There are no real Competitors listed, they won’t be as secure as Bitcoin because they will never reach the Hashrate and they won’t compete with Tor because of their laughably small Network(if there even is one).

New Names same bullshit…

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Stopped reading at node.js

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?

The Protocol is interesting but everything else same old shitcoin formula.
The Hashrate is also laughably low which indicates a low interest in the Network.
Adding a neat Protocol to a useless Token won’t make it more private or secure because of the small/minute audience…

I’m honestly amazed by the amount of BS and PR Twists they still come up with (not talking about Loki only).
Imagine someone tries to sells you the Outranets which is a new spin on the Internet with amazing features and so on but with only a limited amount of people,services who use it and you have to buy some wothless Token to buy in to it.
Would you buy the Outranet? :wink:

If so i got some amazing Snakeoil for sale…

The only real question regarding these “Projects” is:
Why do they need a Coin for that ?

I am not seeing anything near as detailed or knowledgeable as a single Tor spec let alone the entire protocol in their low level “explanation”: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/blob/master/docs/proto_v0.txt

Its description of Tor and I2P’s “shortcomings” is dishonest and ill-informed. Tor lacks UDP support because of the huge number of anonymity attacks this would open. Dir Auths are much safer than a DHT network as far as some attacks are concerned like flooding the network with low quality nodes or sybils.

Nym looks to me serious, good work. I’d bet on it! License is free, ideas fresh, new, they look feasible, but hard work to do.
But I spent just a few minutes looking into it. Maybe someone will notice faults and tell us.

No technical research paper or specs. Lots of buzzwords and unsubstantiated claims. Wants investors in a testnet which isn’t even production level yet.

Nym | The Next Generation of Privacy Infrastructure (their tech is based on the things in these papers)

Kinda the point in wanting investors - to gather funding to make it production level.

That’s just a bunch of different papers (some authored by big time researchers). Still doesn’t answer what exactly they are implementing or what the track record of the programmers behind it is. With the avalanche of scam/shitcoins many of whom are posting “whitepapers” you have to be careful before you trust the tech with your privacy/data/money or even life.

Wanting users to pay before it has had a a chance to prove itself is only going to be a bigger obstacle to get it off the ground IMO. These systems need as much users/volunteers as they can get to provide any good protection.

The papers are not arbitrary. They use the exact things described in some of those papers.

Refer to the second link. E.g. https://nymtech.net/docs/overview/private-access-control/ describes how they use Coconut, https://nymtech.net/docs/overview/network-privacy/ describes how they use Loopix, etc.

There’d be no point in them writing full papers themselves as they’d just be duplicating the contents of the pre-existing papers.

The team is listed at Nym | The Next Generation of Privacy Infrastructure and the papers listed at Nym | The Next Generation of Privacy Infrastructure include some of their work. E.g. Ania Piotrowska was one of the authors of the Loopix paper, Harry Halpin led the NEXTLEAP project, etc.

Nym is the only option that appears to be alright to me with all of the other unpopular networks being sketchy vaporware. Nym uses already established technology, is frequently updated and from what I can tell so far, has decent anonymity and security. Their software is even written in Rust, a memory-safe langauge for example. Although, it is still too early for it to be a serious Tor contender. It could be great once it is extensively audited / battle-tested.

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What about using lokinet and tor in the same time?
user --> lokinet --> tor (obfs4 bridged) --> destination

More specifically: un ubuntu host install the lokinet package (following their wiki), start the service and launch “lokinet-vpn --exit exit.loki --up”, this will result in all the system traffic being routed through lokinet. After this boot whonix up, the gateway will connect to a obfs4 bridge then to the rest of the tor network.

This should result in a tor over loki scenario.
Is this ok to use? for both clearnet and .onion browsing.
thank you

Tor competitors - Orchid Protocol, Mainframe, Obsidian, Skrumble, Dusk, Marconi, Loki, Nym, …

Did any of them read a bit, any, a lot, much or all of the research available on Tor and Tor Browser?

Seems futile me to attempt to design a better anonymity network while not having any clue about the existing research.

https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/

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I want to point out, that routing inside of Loki is free (in sense of money). Only using exit nodes can cost money (at the moment there are free ones).
Also the devs have built Session messenger (getsession [dot] org) which points in a good direction for me.
The speeds of Loki in comparison to Tor is amazing (5-15Mbps up/down). Also there is a build in bottleneck at the moment for, because Loki is still in development.
The size of Loki is also interesting: There are 1760 service nodes (relays) at the moment.

There is no comparison until at least loki audit their code. (which is not done yet)

I am not sure that’s a fair metric? Was Tor code audited?

Then also “audit” isn’t one well defined thing. Every audit has a scope, quality, whatnot. Not necessarily meaningful, it becomes dated, and not mostly directly comparable.