A hacker known as "0x90" wanted a way to chat online without anyone tracing who he was. He ended up building a second internet. It started in 2001 as a small project to let people chat on IRC without anyone tracing who they were. In 2003, a developer known only by the handle jrandom rebuilt the whole thing from scratch and renamed it I2P, the Invisible Internet Project. I2P isn't really trying to hide you while you browse normal websites, the way Tor does. It builds you a second internet that lives entirely inside your regular connection. Inside it are hidden websites called eepsites, hidden chat, and hidden file sharing, all invisible to anyone outside the network. The trick is something called garlic routing. Tor wraps a single message in layers of encryption and passes it hop to hop, like an onion. I2P bundles several messages together into one package before it even leaves your computer, so anyone watching the traffic cannot tell how many separate messages are hiding inside it, or where each one is actually headed. Tor also uses one path both ways. I2P builds a completely separate path for messages coming in and messages going out, up to seven hops each direction. There is no company running any of this, and no central server holding a map of the network. Every computer running I2P is part of that map instead. In 2006, jrandom, the developer who rebuilt the entire project, disappeared. No announcement. He just stopped showing up. For a moment it looked like the whole thing might die with him. It didn't. A group of volunteers, one going by the name zzz, picked the project back up in 2009 and kept building. Twenty three years later, it is still running, still fully open source, still owned by nobody in particular.