_intro

Here is my previous post. There was a suggestion in the comments that I could connect the node to i2p network, I done it and here are my notes:

_i2p

install
sudo pacman -S i2pd
I am not creating any tunnel for now, so I did comment out all lines in /etc/i2pd/tunnels.conf
/etc/i2pd/i2pd.conf
logfile = /var/log/i2pd/i2pd.log loglevel = error ipv4 = true ipv6 = false bandwidth = L share = 35 [reseed] verify = true [limits] transittunnels = 500
enable, so it will start after reboot
sudo systemctl enable i2pd.service
monitoring
You can connect to server from PC over ssh and using portforwarding feature. This command ssh -fTNL -L 7070:127.0.0.1:7070 IP_OF_SERVER will open port 7070 on your PC, so you can browse http://localhost:7070 to watch info from server i2pd webconsole. Do this only on local network.
accessing i2p net from pc
you can do same trick with portforwarding over ssh to forward port 4444 and then setup proxy access in firefox to localhost:4444 After that you can browse eepstatus or Bitcoin hidden full node clearnet will not be accessible.
notes
I did not setup upnp and did not port forward any port for i2pd on main router. So no other i2p nodes will make connectio to mine.

_bitcoind

/etc/bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
I did add following lines
i2psam=127.0.0.1:7656 onlynet=i2p
then restart bitcoind. It will create i2p service / address which you can see in btc-explorer in node details and same should be in i2pd webconsole under SAM sessions.
I am not sure but at begining you need to connect your node to some othere i2p nodes, after that they will talk and exchange other i2p nodes addresses.
I did read this doc and choose some i2p addresse from nodes_main.txt
you can run this command as normal user on server using RPC credentials bitcoin-cli -rpcuser=YOUR_USERS -rpcpassword=YOUR_PASS -datadir=/mnt/node_1/blockchain addnode "2v5nr3u3scbyxd3nkqxinw2pvqqe66y4hc3u6gotil2sgbyivruq.b32.i2p:0" "onetry" and it will add i2p node.

_final notes

yes, I could configured tunnel for access btc-explorer and fulcrum but at this moment I have no plan to use i2p. Maybe I will try that during long winter evenings ;-)
20 sats \ 1 reply \ @anon 24 Sep
onlynet=i2p
Unless this is some special setup and you really need onlynet=i2p, then better to avoid it. onlynet=i2p will instruct bitcoind to only connect to I2P peers. Is there a reason to avoid IPv4 peers? If yes, then keep it, but the problem with onlynet=i2p is that, since creating I2P addresses is much easier than creating IPv4 addresses, an attacker may have created a lot of them and your node may end up making all of its outbound connections to the attacker, making it more likely to be Sybiled.
You do not need the bitcoin-cli addnode step, bitcoind will do this automatically for you.
reply
well, check my previous post, I am adding that onlynet=i2p to config where I already have onlynet=ipv4 and onlynet=onion
as I said, I was not sure about addnode so I have done it. anyway, thanks for confirmation that it is not necessary.
reply
i was just setting up i2p and tried to search for a easy tutorial on this. I will add it to my do to list and bump the priority as high as reasonable. thanks for sharing!
reply
I remember setting up my node to use i2p, but even after a day or two had zero i2p inbound connections. So I disabled i2p and made the node tor-only.
reply
I am running it with i2p just for few days, checking peer list randomly and mostly there are at least 2 nodes over i2p, 2 nodes over ipv4 and 15 nodes over onion.
I did not find way how to balance connection between different networks. I did reduce number of connections and maybe if I will increase limit then it will be more balance, but I dont know.
reply
bitcoind tries to maintain at least one outbound connection to each reachable network. The remaining outbound connections are chosen randomly and depend on the distribution of addresses in the list of known peers.
Use e.g. bitcoin-cli getnodeaddresses 0 ipv4 |jq length to see the number of known IPv4 peers.
Inbounds are not controlled or tried to be balanced.
reply