Using I2P for Bitcoin Nodes: Is it Viable?

Do you guys think there are enough I2P peers to run a solid Bitcoin node? Also, would relying on I2P slow down transaction propagation or block syncing?

Obviously performing the initial block download I2P would be much slower than using clearnet, but I imagine since there is at least one I2P node ran by Core developers (it can be found in the documentation related to I2P somewhere in the Github repo of Core), it is theoretically possible to use only that peer for syncing. Though it is definitely not reliable to only have one peer.

The interesting question for me is what are the advantages of running the node over I2P instead of Tor. I haven't really looked into it. I 've read about the I2P protocol in the past and, from what I 've read: 1. The obvious difference is that on I2P you can only connect with I2P, whereas a Tor node can connect (potentially) to clearnet as well. 2. Privacy-wise I2P must be superior. I have no idea about speed, latency, reachability etc.

I don't know whether there's any reliable data about total Bitcoin node that use I2P. https://bitnodes.io/nodes/ currently shows about 22.8K reachable node. But if you search ".i2p" on the search column, it shows 0 node (which should be incorrect). Yes, it's definitely slower than using clearnet. Just like Tor, I2P use multiple hops/nodes to perform communication. https://geti2p.net/en/about/performance explain about it in detail.

I have a general opinion that I2P isn't very actively used in many applications, am I wrong? Not just bitcoin, but generally. I think this can be manipulated, because there are multiple occasions where I 've known about .onion nodes that weren't visible in the bitnodes website. I don't know how it's possible, but I 've seen it happening. That's why people say that the total number of nodes is actually higher than the one visible on the website.

Yeah. At least, i'm sure it's less popular than Tor since I2P can't access clearnet. In this case, i wonder whether those node somehow manage to identify and ban connection bitnodes. That's right, although usually it's stated when mentioning nodes that doesn't or unable to accept incoming connection.

Yes. Around 3,000 I2P peers is already more than enough for a reliable Bitcoin node. The number is steadily increasing, as shown in the chart. Source: 21.ninja

Quoted to show the picture and slightly modified because no [img]pic-url[/img] tags were used by caesrcd. If only he used talkimg.com instead of deprecated imgur.com as picture hoster, fixed that too...