Just excited to announce I just got done implementing the first message of the hidden service chat protocol, client sends encrypted route request message to the introducer, introducer wraps it in the reply onion. The hidden service can now send a "ready" message back to the client, and the bulk of this procedure repeats for the request/response cycle.

While anonymity is a central goal of Indra, hidden services also function as a way to simplify p2p network programming. They function as a new kind of virtual network listener that doesn't leak its location to the network. Primarily they are for anonymity, but the location concealing 4 hop paths are just one layering construction. The messages could be sent in parallel with redundancy with only one intermediate point on each of the paths, and provide an unprecedented capability to users: fast, low latency connections that can survive everything but the absolute worst case doomsday scenario.

The democratising of running servers has been a bee in my bonnet since I got started using the internet. The big boys erect unduly high barriers against us little people doing business on the internet without their permissions and licences. Indra will once and for all end the two class society of internet users.