Experimental code increased the understanding of these complex systems across a greater population of developers.

If we are going to come out on top, then we need to play the long game. In that case, experimental code has a lot of value.

Although I agree with your premise that clear designs are essential, I'd say that it's important nonetheless to implement them. Having an implementation is a marker of whether the design does/does not work. A whitepaper can theoretically show this, but an application is always (in my experience) more effective.

For example, when Satoshi first published the whitepaper for Bitcoin, there was talk on the crypto mailing list that it wouldn't scale due to its gossip-based protocol. Satoshi's design showed it did, and laid the foundations for future cryptocurrencies (Namecoin, Peercoin).

P.S. I've been following your work with Tribler, excellent stuff!

Doesn't I2P fit better, considering the design requirements? Tor would require very significant changes to scale better for high volume traffic, but I2P already handles it reasonably well.

I wonder why I2P is getting so small amount of love. I've read somewhere that for some reason it's popular only in Russia. It has two working email systems, working Bittorrent and much more. Maybe it lacks a native (C or C++) implementation?

I2P is slow, it has no incentive system like T4T.

Try installing it, search for files and watch download speeds. Onion routing and tunnels cost bandwidth. The crowd that is used to Bittorrent speeds (in combo with VPN safety) is not interested in 2 Kbit/sec speeds. Plus the user interface is hard to understand without having attended crypto courses.

@synctext: you can't have traffic anonymity without routing. And I2P is mainly slow because the shared bandwidth is low.

Also, it isn't a hard as you claim. It is mainly a matter of setup.

My understanding of tribler is that it is going to use onion style routing and use some internal cryptocurrency to incentivize users to provide bandwidth. They hope that with proper incentives people will provide enough bandwidth to enable speeds that are high enough to stream high def video anonymously. They hope to prevent spam by enabling anonymous wiki editing of torrent channels and voting of torrent quality.

It hasn't been studied as extensively as Tor.

Which is why we need to get it studied more.

Sure, but that's still the reason it isn't as widely used. And because research resources in the anonymous-networking field are so limited the marginalization of I2P tends to be self-reinforcing.