Hi, I wonder just how dark darknet is? For instance, I have not meet any of the people running the nodes I trust. I suspect this is the norm and very probably will remain so. On the other hand I would like a fair ammount of anonomity. I am not sure just how much anonomity open open will give. Another point, 'fun' is being had getting darknet to perform. Introducing another algorythm into the mix is not going to make this easier.
Given that darknet is not all that dark and the opennet is going to make an already tricky system more complex, I wonder why we do not just extend the darknet concept? We could use the swap messages for this. I see the process working something like this. Nodes keeps stats on their peers, watching for peers that are abnormal (eg never reply with data, drop too many packets, are only up 50% of the time, do not update often etc.) When nodes agree to swap why not have them swap this info too? I am not sugesting they just swap the data for thier peers (and hense tell swap parteners who they are connected to), but rather that they swap all the data they have found in previous swaps. We probably want to decay this data so older data istrusted less and we may randomly want to omit some nodes data. The result of the above process is that a node will have an idea of nodes that are trustworthy. This will allow a node to ask during the swap process, do you want to connect? If both swap parteners have enough data to trust each other and they both need more peers they can just exchange connect data. We may also want to take into account how close the locations are and use this as part of the criteria to accept a connection (eg if all peers are close, we really want new peers to be further away and vice versa). An algorythm like this would let a node build a connection to freenet with just one reference. Its simple enough to put a message on the webpage telling a newbie that his node is still integrating itself into the network and that slower performance should be expected. It would also mean that existing node owners do not have to go ref fishing (irc freenet-ref etc) every couple of weeks. I suspect it would end up producing a darknet that is considerabliy darker than the current one. It would also reduce the urgency (and maybe the requirement) for opennet. Comments, Ed
