No fools on i2p

This technique was used by "dial-up" banking in the 1990's among other entities including some sophisticated BBS. It was later adopted by some anonymous networks for the trusted nodes. I mean no insults or allegations this is by far my favorite i2p site and I mean no harm.

Just some bullshit made up analogy to understand the basic principle. If a car can do 0-100 km/hr in 3 seconds it must be a Ferrari Testa-Rosa. If you can get some in between samples of acceleration, engine temperature, torque etc, you can be sure that it is Mario Andretti's Testa-Rosa driven by the racing legend himself.

So you could take your laptop (with a removable Hard Drive when Hard Drives became popular) to the bank and they did the fingerprint bench-marking. It was usually complex math for your laptop: PnID (processor integration and differentiation), root "n" and other things that you can search online for bench-marking. It had some other security features like double passwords (one that the customer selected and knew) and one time codes that had to be changed every 3 month or 100 transactions, whichever came first. The actual banking part was a simple spread sheet with sync features.

When large corporations started to take over the smaller ISPs there were a lot of disgruntled business owners that became part of an anonymous network. Think of today's Robin Hood Stock Market App.

How did it work? Your previous ISP provider gave you a CD/DVD with one time codes monthly for a fee. Anybody could buy it and it was no requirement that you had to be a previous customer but for trust reason it was preferred to know each other to avoid paranoia taking over.

When you bootstrapped on the network you were provided with 4 nodes (2 in and 2 out) and identified some hidden location where the codes were placed.
The direct connect nodes (4) were connected to other 4 nodes which were in contact with the one time code provider and 2 bidirectional exit nodes. With the exception of the exit part everybody defaulted to sync programs.
For the providers of the service there were strict hardware requirements including very accurate clocks (some form of Kerberos?) and some stress bench-marking.

The Prize Questions:

1. Do you think that entities on i2p do fingerprint benchmarking to select nodes?

2. I can see other networks piggyback from time to time but do they have advanced insider info which nodes to pick?
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Posted on RetroBBS