8kun (rebrand after 8chan was banned) does host their site on lokinet and still does, for two years now though, right?

8kun only had a SNApp on Lokinet for about 2-3 weeks, they also had a .onion site on Tor too, but at that point Lokinet was very new and the network could not handle any real production level scale, so they quickly had technical issues and left.

Is it just a coincidence that the biggest site hosted on your network is 8kun?

8kun doesn’t have any SNApp / .loki address that i know about, and it hasn’t been the case for years that they have had 8kun running on Lokinet

So it’s pure coincidence that Ron’s father Jim Watson, who has been hosting 8chan and is now running 8kun, has transferred some of his old business into a “Loki Technology Inc.” of his own some time ago (see https://www.5ch.net), and that 8kun’s planned “Project ODIN” caters to the same Norse mythology theme. It almost made me wonder, especially since Loki’s dev Jeff has also been active on endchan.

Also coincidence, Loki Technology Inc and Project ODIN have no relationship to Oxen (Formerly Loki) I’ve never met any of the 8kun people, Jim watkins, Ron watkins or any of them, and didnt know about them before they started using Lokinet to host 8kun. We started Oxen (Formerly Loki) in 2018 in Australia and had no idea about 8chan.

Also: $17k min investment to help the network, lmao that’s insane and I can’t imagine that does any good.

Its a different type of network structure, it has been essential in forming our network of nearly ~1,800 Service Nodes which act as the routers in Lokinet

Hey, i’m the CTO at Oxen, just wanted to take some time out to answer the questions/concerns in this post and related comments.

if people who are supposed to be the backbone of the onion-routing service are paid to do this I worry that in some (maybe new and still unknown) way this will weaken the network in comparison to a network run by volunteers and users (like tor and i2p). Maybe this will favor larger servers so all of the onion-routing is done in “the cloud” and none from home which in result is easier to surveil.

Actually we think that the cryptocurrency aspect of things improves the networks ability to resist really common attacks like Sybil attacks and generally improves the quality of the nodes added to the network. Sybil attacks for example are much more expensive on Lokinet, since each Service Node operator needs to stake 15,000 Oxen to start a new Service Node, which is approximately $17,000 USD. Particularly it creates a feedback loop where the more Oxen that is bought off the market and locked into Service Nodes, the more expensive it becomes to buy more Oxen and lock it into Service Nodes. The other main advantage is we can enforce desirable network behavior by locking a Service Node’s stake, which means we can create a fairly large network of always online, high bandwidth nodes https://oxendashboard.com/#4 . We think this is an advantage over I2P, which is a larger network, but is mostly comprised of low bandwidth and low reliability nodes which exacerbates performance issues. Although your points about most Service Nodes running inside of data centers is true, we must ask the question as to whether we can build a viable, widely used onion routing network just using personal computers and residential internet connections? to me it seems that the need for high bandwidth onion routing has outweighed the need for lower bandwidth routing as evidenced by the adoption levels of Tor vs I2P, considering that most Tor routers also run inside data centers.

a talk at the yearly chaos computer congress about the alt-rights online behavior titled “Let’s play Infokrieg” (the talk is in German, but I linked the version with english live translation) talks about lokinet and how the developer advertised it on 8chan. This is all the connection they mention though and it’s pretty thin Imo.

This is incorrect, that post where Jeff, the primary developer of Lokinet is promoting Lokinet is actually on Endchan not 8Chan/8Kun. We don’t have any association with the alt right, and the non-for-profit that develops Lokinet https://optf.ngo is fairly apolitical mostly focusing on defending human rights and furthering privacy enhancing technologies.

it’s in the hands of people nobody knows

We don’t really make an effort to hide the team or anything, many of us have public profiles, an out of date list of some of our team members can be found here https://loki.network/team/

Under the Lokinet initiator’s announcement on 8chan, someone pointed out that “LLARP” is a funny name for that, to which the Lokinet initiator replied that they considered calling the server implementation “WIZARD”, which is itself a self-referential term for sad virgin men in the *chan-context, but also just shows that the “LLARP” acronym wasn’t accidental.

This is pure coincidence, LLARP stands for Low Latency Onion Routing Protocol, i forget what WIZARD stood for but it was something similarly onion routing related. We aren’t designing protocol names to dogwhistle to alt-right groups.