Yggdrasil Network

FAQ >> Is Yggdrasil anonymous? No, it is not a goal of the Yggdrasil project to provide anonymity.

I understand that the problem is hard, has its own set of issues to solve beyond just technical, but this honestly makes it a non-starter for me. Anything that would be an actual internet evolution would need to include actual anonymity. Apart from this, I simply do not see what problem it actually solves for the existing internet that is not already solved with the current setup.

Anonymity isn’t a goal for Yggdrasil anymore than it is a goal for for BGP, OSPF, BATMAN etc. Anonymous networks also generally have very high costs/overheads as they often engineer long and indirect paths for obscurity. See the generally poor performance/reliability of Tor circuits for an example of why we probably wouldn’t want the entire Internet to work this way.

Why? I think it makes perfect sense to focus on a mesh routing protocol and make anonymity something optional that you can lay on top of it. No reason you can't run a Yggdrasil network and have an I2P network within it. This way there isn't as much of a performance hit for communications that don't call for anonymity, and anonymous peers can be established without being on the clearnet.

Optimized latency can deanonymize, so better to layer anonymization on top.