Onion-like routing. It takes multiple hops to get to a destination. Each hop can only decrypt the next destination to send the packet to (i.e. peeling off a layer of the onion).
Would that keep lawyers from just taking the last ip they get for their frivolous law suits? That way I could get a letter for something I actually didn't download
I mean, you can be sued for anything, but it will get thrown out. Like, I guess the MPAA could offer a movie for download, then try to sue the first hop they upload a chunk to, but that really doesn't make any sense (because they offered it for download in the first place). Furthermore, the first hop(s) aren't the people that are using the file, and they can't even read it. If people could successfully sue nodes, then ISPs and postal services could be sued for anything that passes through their networks.
It’s next to impossible to do this. I think if you read up on the topic you’ll have a better understanding; I’d like to explain more but it’s difficult to do so without knowing your level of expertise, etc.
The TL;DR is that nodes on i2p have no clue which nodes line up with which IP addresses. It’s true that from outside the overly you can see it’s i2p traffic, but you’d need to defeat so many layers of encryption that it’s close to impossible.
You will still always know where the packet last came from, otherwise it could not be routed to you. As I live in germany I have to deal with the threat of lawyers sending letters when they 'caught you' torrenting. So if anyone uses this in germany without a vpn and happens to be the last one in the chain they will use it just like they use their current system to claim you pirated stuff because you were uploading stuff through torrents.
If they can't follow the chain how do they know that you got something illegal? As I understand it the ISP would just see that you got an encrypted Paket from some random IP. Am I mistaking?
Yeah, I live in lawsuit happy USA and pirating through i2p has never landed me letters in the mail. They don’t even know what it is you’re looking at let alone where it truly came from.
Again, I really recommend reading about the subject instead of trusting some idiot (me) on the internet.
Of course they can. If they set up a honeypot and your ip is caught seeding, even if it is only as an exit point to i2p, they have you connected to the distribution of that torrent. I'm not saying they will win before a court, but they will send you a letter and a lot of people don't challenge those
By how the protocol is structured, it's impossible for the address a downloader sees to know what the packet they forward actually contains, so they're just taking the role of an ISP. Also, they don't know the original source IP.