If you want a way to torrent without a VPN, while using anonymous networks, look into I2P. It’s not a mesh network, and it will be slow, but it’s suitable for torrenting.

I’ve never heard of reticulum before now, and only spent a few minutes going over their overly philosophized website, but I do have a degree in networking.

tl;dr Don’t do it.

It’s an amnesiac mesh network, or in an analogy, it’s like if you’re in a crowded room and can only see the person next to you, but you’re sure someone you know is also in the room, so you pass a note to everyone next to you hoping it gets to the person you want.

This is inefficient for large scale data transfer, to say the least, but does theoretically fit their stated purpose of an anonymizing network to transmit information.

But this brings up two problems:

1.) In a normal network, even Tor or I2P, information flows along a path one hop at a time, with each hop knowing which path to send your information down next. i.e. Person A only knows Person B and sends your note to them, Person B knows lots of people but only sends your note to Person C, because Person B knows the note is intended for Person F, and that’s how you get there, and so on. With this network, Person A sends a note to Person B, Person C, Person D, Person E, Person F, hoping that one of them knows how to get to Person F. Each individual contacted then goes ‘Am I person F? No? Then I need to send it to every person I know, except who I just got it from.’ There are rules in place, supposedly, to keep this from becoming an infinite loop, but still that’s potentially 100x or a 1000x the amount of traffic for every single packet, every single part of any file sent on the network.

a 100MB file split into 10,000 packets would result in 10,000,000 or more packets being sent over the network.

This is fine, theoretically, for legitimate text communication that would never reach more than a few MB per item, but torrenting even the smallest movie would be like a tsunami every single time.

There are few rules and safeguards built in to make this slightly more efficient than the scenario and analogy I just laid out, but it’s infinitely less efficient than the IP layer so you want the data kept to a minimum given the much, much higher overhead.

2. On network torrenting might work (with the problems mentioned above), and routing through the network as that VPN solution might work (assuming the peer at the end, literally someone else’s computer, allows it *3) You’d have incredibly slow speeds. Even assuming there is route caching somewhere in the documentation that I missed which would massively increase efficiency, you’d be generating a whole lot of noise and unnecessary connections with each packet sent to each peer, which would slow down the entire network you’re connected to, and might crash some transport nodes if enough people have their torrent clients set up with high peer discovery numbers.

3.) this is not a private connection when you come out on the other side. Computer A <=> Reticulum Network <=> Computer B -> Internet would be the general configuration, and both computer A and computer B would have full knowledge of the contents of the information being sent, which also means Computer B’s ISP has the full knowledge of the contents of the information being sent.

For torrenting, this might mean computer B learns a lesson about hosting what is essentially an exit node for anonymous networks – i.e. their ISP shutting off their service for piracy. While this is good for you, Computer A, it’s a dick move.

For more nefarious purposes Computer B would know what traffic they’re exposing and could snoop on it, just not know where it’s from. This is the Tor problem and there’s plenty of ways to keep yourself safe from it, but it’s still something to keep in mind if you do actually naughty things with your connection like the protocol authors want you to be doing. (i.e. anything illegal in a country that a state actor would actually care about). This comes down to opsec but the best solution would then be to simply never leave the reticulum network, making the ‘vpn’ you pointed to conceptually worthless for the network’s stated purpose.

4.) I’ve not been able to find a single actual security audit or even a implementation project, given this is (or can be) a localized mesh network, this wouldn’t be hard to do. This means no one should trust this beyond sending an anonymous love note to a nerdy colleague. Anything that might be entered into evidence in any court should stay off the platform.

Reticulum is a new network spec different from IP. I don’t think you can piggy back over ip. So you’d need to build network infrastructure

I’ve never heard of reticulum, but I may well be dumb