The chain is effectively ordering the nodes by public key, with the head of the line being the highest public keys and the tail of the line being the lowest ones. Nodes bootstrap by looking for their keyspace neighbours and building paths to them, which intermediate nodes will track in their routing tables, so at each hop, you effectively route “towards” a public key based on the known paths.
I’m confused. Is this designed to provide anonymity? If not, why not send messages directly to the target’s IP address rather than go through a bunch of hops?
So that you don't need n connections to communicate with n servers, which won't scale past a few thousand servers (probably even less if you also consider that the idea is have phones run the p2p server on mobile data connections).
This is not designed to provide anonymity. You don’t send messages directly to the target’s IP because they are likely not to be directly routable - eg they could be only contactable via Bluetooth Low Energy, or an adhoc wifi segment, with no clearnet IP routing connecting them to the ‘net. So you use pinecone to route instead.
