John Oliver and DeepOnion. Oh, really?!!

Today I've been roaming the internet and searching for some crypto news and was kindly surprised noticing John Oliver's new release about the cryptocurrency. Of course, it was funny as always, though I could notice he didn't particularly try to get deeper in the subject. Anyway, I think it's ok considering that the goal of the show is making people laugh...

Screenshot from youtube.com

He basically said the right things, mentioning some scam (bitconnect) or definitely overrated (EOS) projects and speaking about the stupidity of peoples, who are getting all-in with projects without doing a smart research. But anyway I couldn't miss the part where he tried to joke about DeepOnion drawing attention to its name. Please, man, you're making a show for millions of audience, but too lazy to check such details?

Why DeepOnion?

Ok, the name "DeepOnion", especially the ONION part may seem ridiculous to many, but not those who understand how the Tor network works and where the "Onion" word comes from. So just let me explain it as simple as I can and you'll understand that "DeepOnion" is not a joke, but a really symbolic name.

How Tor network works and why is it anonymous?

The main idea is very simple - Tor is like a network of proxy servers. It routes your request through randomly picked nodes (3 by default) and changes them occasionally, which makes tracking you almost impossible. But there still remains a security problem, since Tor nodes are computers like yours and you can't just trust them the data you're transferring.

To solve this problem Tor will encrypt your request data 3 times (or more, based on the number of nodes), so that it may be decrypted "layer by layer" on every node, each node will only know where to transfer your request further, but won't know what it actually contains. This process of decryption in some case is much like peeling the onion, that's why many times ago community called it TOR - The Onion Router.

Why Deep?

Technologies like Tor or I2P not only provides you and anonymity and privacy but also gives you access to the side of the web which you can't access using regular browser. This part of internet usually called Dark or Deep web.
Also, I must say that despite the general misconception, not only criminals using DeepWeb nowadays. For example, you may find many people who just carry about their privacy or people deprived of free speech by their government, who are forced to hide. But this is a subject for a separate article :)

So "Deep Web" + "Onion Router" = "DeepOnion"

Thanks for reading, hope I've answered the question "why DeepOnions name is DeepOnion", hope you've learned something new. And hope that John Oliver's words about DeepOnion will only bring popularity to this amazing project and won't hurt it in any way :)