But think of the underlying issue though: bandwidth. At least, I think that is your concern here. The ones who carry the biggest burden with Queries, is those who cannot responde to them but merely broadcast them. So, that would always be the freeloader. In my opinion, that is not such a bad thing at all.

A much better solution to this issue would be to deny sending a result to a freeloader. Queryhits are usually bigger, even when the broadcasted Queries are summed up. By refraining from sending a Queryhit to someone known as a freeloader, you will:

1) reduce bandwidth
2) give the freeloader incentive to contribute

I've followed some discussions here about that as well. The best one I've seen, and also something I'm looking to implement in my client, is a "rating". When the user runs his Gnutella client for the first time, his rating is 50/50. But the more he dowloads without uploading, his ratio drops. Below a certain ratio, he/she is assumed a "freeloader". This data can easily be sent with a Query.

Obviously, there are a few drawbacks to that method. The first would be those who figure out what to edit to increase their ratio. The second would be where the user shares stuff that, in general, is not popular. There's a third one too, where the user could rename junk/text files to popular files in order to increase his ratio. However, with the introduction of what is known as HUGE (a hashing system), this will most likely not survive for long.

-- Mike