What I really want is a private, secure IPFS. I do want the network functionality, but I want it to exist only between my nodes. I know I can pin encrypted blobs, but I want something that handles this transparently. Is this possible somewhere?
There's some documentation here: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/release-v0.9.0/docs/exp...
A bootstrap node is just any node that's (more or less) permanently reachable on the public Internet. Same as lots of tech like this, IPFS needs them for initial peer discovery and (in many cases, and I'm guessing in IPFS' case as well) NAT-breaking, plus as a route of last resort.
Freenet allows connecting only to peers, and is the same sort of p2p hash-based storage cache. It's about as old as Tor.