I2P and it's sub 100 kb/s speed? Series, games would never finish downloading, but then also only those torrents are accessible through I2P that are published to an I2P tracker, there is no DHT (yet?). Clearnet torrents and clearnet peers are not accessible through I2P.
Or is it something on my end that makes it that slow? ISP download bandwidth is stable and much higher.
While it's true that i2p torrents are slower than clearnet torrents the speed is not really as bad in my experience. I would say i can download most shows, movies and files in general in 1-2 days max (I know that is slow in comparison, but its OK if you are just building up your library, atleast for me). On average i would say a "normal 1080p movie" finishes in 5-6 hours (In my experience). The bigger Problem is sometimes the lack of torrents and seeders, although this is getting better
The total speed of my torrents has been 200KB/s, once even got 300KB/s. Honestly, that's not a problem for me; I'm not hooked and don't need an instant fix.
It's also logical that I2P can't access the clearnet. That's not the purpose of I2P. Theoretically there can be inproxies and outproxies, but AFAIK very few people operate them. Having an outproxy is like operating a TOR exit node.
Speed is side-effect of anonymity. The more people you route a request through, the slower it gets. It's at least as slow as the slowest link. A VPN is one single, high speed link, but it doesn't grant you anonymity (if the VPN provider collects logs). IINM you need at least 2 hops to be anonymous. A - B - C, B doesn't know if A is the source or just forwarding a request nor if C is the final destination or just another hop.
I wanted to search for the postman tracker's address, so went to check on notbob.i2p. website unreachable. Isn't this a relatively fairly popular site here?
Edit: on a second try it now loaded in ~10 seconds.
This latency is probably not to much of a problem, but two things:
the instability that it couldn't even start loading the site, and it's regularity
if a text site with few graphics takes this much time to transfer, bittorrent and movies will be even worse because that's often not compressible
The biggest issue I've had with I2P so far has been lack of content.
postman.i2p only permits torrents which includes its tracker in the torrent file, which means popular torrents from 1337x, TPB et al can't be uploaded there (at least not without changing the infohash). Torrent clients like qBittorrent and BiglyBT can cross-seed on I2P and clearnet networks which is a recent development since libtorrent 2.0 came out (software packages take a while to bump to.the latest library), but from what I've tested nearly all of the infohashes I put into my client from "clearnet" torrent sites have stalled, probably because I2P is a little too bespoke at the moment.
The potential is definitely there IMO, but unless you're just watching mainstream movies and TV it's not a replacement for clearnet/VPN.
I doubt it. I2P is like TOR, but more optimised for P2P and has less users, so it's much slower (100-200KB/s on established connctions). But if the number of users grows, it may become much faster.