A detailed and Interesting article.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/01/under-the-hood-of-i2p-the-tor-alternative-that-reloaded-silk-road/Tor is apparently no longer a safe place to run a marketplace for illegal goods and services. With the alleged operator of the original Silk Road marketplace, Ross Ulbricht, now going to trial, the arrest of his alleged successor and a number of others in a joint US-European law enforcement operation, and the seizure of dozens of servers that hosted "hidden services" on the anonymizing network, the operators of the latest iteration of Silk Road have packed their tents and moved to a new territory: the previously low-profile I2P anonymizing network.
On the surface, I2P (which originally was an acronym for "Invisible Internet Project") is similar in many ways to the Tor Project's anonymizing service. Like Tor, I2P encapsulates and anonymizes communications over the Internet, passing Web requests and other communications through a series of proxies to conceal the location and identity of the user. Like Tor, I2P also allows for the configuration of websites within the network that are concealed from the Internet at large. Called "eepsites," these equivalents to Tor's hidden services can only be reached by using the anonymizing network or a portal site that connects to the I2P proxy network.
The search for anonymous methods of facilitating illegal deals goes on and will continue to do so across many platforms of technology, yesterday it was tor , today I2P and tomorrow something new, my only real concern amongst all of this is of govt overreactions that often adversely affect many to target a minuscule few
