Can Gini Work with Tor, I2P & Other Anonymity Networks?

The existing Gini privacy features are already very strong and they ensure that no private transaction information can ever be revealed to third-parties without the Gini account owner's permission and a corresponding secure, cryptographic audit key. Additionally, every Gini transaction is encrypted and encapsulated into a single generic UDP packet. (The UDP network protocol carries traffic for millions of different Internet-based services.) That means at the network protocol level Gini transactions don't look like financial transactions at all. In fact, they simply look like random data packets spread across many random IP addresses throughout the Internet. Thus, nobody could ever sniff a Gini stakeholder's network traffic to detect the presence of a Gini transaction.

Although Gini does not record any IP addresses in the Gini public ledger, some people are understandably paranoid about gigantic governments, corporations, and professional espionage firms sniffing their real-time traffic and using sophisticated traffic analysis to trace their Gini transactions (even though this would reveal nothing about their Gini transactions). So, they might like to take their privacy to the highest imaginable level by completely anonymizing their real-time UDP traffic.

People with these concerns can already use widely available and highly secure VPNs and proxies if they want to anonymize all their network traffic. Nevertheless, we are exploring the possibility of routing Gini transactions over the Tor or I2P anonymity networks to provide the highest level of privacy imaginable.

However, the performance impact would be significant because the structure of every anonymity network inherently results in slower data transmission speeds. Additionally, we don't think we should implement Tor/I2P by default because some people prefer to use their own privacy-enhancing proxies and VPNs, which are much faster than any Tor/I2P channel. If we imposed the Tor/I2P channel on everybody by default, then people who prefer their own solutions would be upset and the default Gini experience for everybody would be much slower, even for the vast majority of stakeholders who don't really need the added Tor/I2P features.

If we receive enough interest in this feature, we will implement it as an option in the Gini GUI, which will enable stakeholders to route Gini transactions over Tor/I2P as needed. But please understand that it's not necessary at all for >99.9999% of stakeholders because the existing Gini privacy features are already sufficient to completely eliminate any real-world possibility of revealing private transaction information. And for people who really want all their UDP traffic fully anonymyzed in addition to Gini's existing privacy features, there are already many solutions available for them to use with Gini any time they want.