your basic idea is quite good, but i can think of a pretty big problem--most (all?) servent automatically set a lot maximum connection limit, and few users, even those on t3-level connections, set it much higher. each servent will fill up within seconds, moving from the top of the list on down. as it is now, the connections are randomly spread out among the entire network, causing far less load on any one particular servent at a given time. what we need is, like you say, a list of static-ip servents that can be downloaded from a high-capacity website (sourceforge might work well) by any client if the user clicks a 'find more hosts'-type button. however, the list should be parsed randomly so that everyone isn't trying to connect to the same clients in the same order. once a client finds one servent, the pongs come flying in and populate their own host cache, so the problem is only finding that first host. :)