I’ve been working on that. It’s a hard problem, but emule works quite well. I propose something based on that: when you start a program, you advertise all the sha256’s of all the files you share. Whenever you need a resource, you send a request to the dht for its sha256. Anyone who has the file will opportunistically try to send it to you.

Since it’s a dht, there’s nothing to take down. And since it operates on sha256s of data, it’s implicitly secure. And it uses tor for the rendezvous, so it’s not possible to track who is requesting what, except by unique ID (which can just be a bitcoin wallet address you control).

The hard part is, what do you do about abuse? What if someone spams the network with bots that try to fulfill every request with bad data?

If anyone has research refs in this direction, I’d be grateful to read them. I’d also like to avoid a blockchain if possible, since it seems unnecessary for simple federated distributed data.