I have an idea that I have expressed many parts of before. Personally the advancement of gnutella is moving much to slowly for me. Not that I have a right to complain as I am not a programer and thus cannot contribute to actual software development. What I try to do is offer the best ideas I can. I have brought up the idea of a blend of gnutella and freenet many times but would like to try to get some developers together to try to create it and see what it could become.

The implementation would consist of the current basic gnutella protocol with a few tweaks. Therefor the easiest thing to do would probably be to take an excellent open source client like gnucleus and modify it.

All clients on the network would be required to share some amount of harddisk space for network usage. This space would be used to store encrypted files (or parts of files). The amount of space would probably be at least 100mb but should maybe be more. Users would also be able to share unencrypted files just as they currently do, though this would be optional. Probably users should not be able to download a file bigger than the space they are willing to share with the network.

All comunication between clients would be encrypted, including searches. If a client initiates a download it should not know if it was downloading an encrypted file or an unencrypted file. Some percentage of transfers would be proxied (maybe multiple times), thus clients would not be able to be certain of the source of the file (let alone if the source even knew it had the file).

Parts of files or whole files could be stored in the encrypted space. In addition the network should allow fot the sharing of partially downloaded files. Therefor the network should base hashing on the TigerTree method. This would also solve the problem of changing hashes due to small file changes as the rest of the unchanged file could be swarmed.

The protocol should also be tweaked to allow for better searching power (+, -, " ", ect), superpeers, metadata, distributed network file rating, ect.

It would also be great to see this as an explorer plugin so that people could host pages and files on the network and link to them on the web. Since it is a plugin people would have to have it running to use the links to the FreeTella network and they would be giving back at the same time.

I think the benefits of such a network should be obvious. Clearly it would be much harder to stop and network resources would be greatly increased. Freeloaders would be eliminated but people would not have to worry about not having any of their own files to share to get on the network (they are sharing resources).

Questions and comments are welcome.

If anyone is interested in helping get the idea of the ground let me know. It would be great.