Logically a message simply travels from our computer to another by using an IP address. The large number of physical routers in between makes the routing process transparent for us.

There are advantages to this scheme in that traffic congestion or hardware failures are handled by the system and our traffic continues to flow.

The blatant disadvantage is that you are now subject to the system, the tracking and being limited to which destination you can reach.

Consider when the user’s computer and optionally manually by the user the routing is decided locally.

The user does not use a unique IP of the destination but a list of next nodes along the path. The first router uses the first node Id to select the next node in the path and strips it’s Id from the path. This process repeats until the message arrives at the destination.

When using the Matryoshka protocol, the nodes or routers in the path can only see the identifiers of previous and subsequent nodes. What the entire path is, the source and destination, remains unknown.

The message is private and untraceable. Only the user’s computer knows the path and it knows it fully.

This was difficult in the 1980s. This is very doable today.