Please say more about "the potential of real overlay networks".

Well, tunneling your web traffic to some random "VPN" provider and having all traffic flow out in the open to the internet is just defending against your last mile ISP basically. A real encrypted overlay would be a fully connected mesh between all the nodes of the network. Like IPSec was originally meant to work (transport mode, anyone being able to set up a security association to any other IP address with common PKI)

Thanks.

> Well, tunneling your web traffic to some random "VPN" provider and having all traffic flow out in the open to the internet is just defending against your last mile ISP basically.

People use VPN services because they can't trust their ISPs. ISPs log traffic, shape traffic, share data with adversaries, etc, etc. People instead choose to trust VPN providers. Typically, there are few ISPs to choose from. But there are numerous VPN services.

> A real encrypted overlay would be a fully connected mesh between all the nodes of the network.

Well, there are https://peervpn.net/ and https://www.onioncat.org/ (which connects through Tor). From years ago, I recall one from some Russian with a friend in Antarctica. But not even the name :(

Also http://hack.org/mc/projects/btns/