Since the Gnutella protocol does not specify how peer nodes are discovered, I see that there are servers in a text file that cache the network's participants -- at leat I think this is how it works. This seems to be a violation, at least philosophically, of the whole "serverless" P2P idea.

If, for security and network accessibility reasons, a Gnutella network could not use these servers, and, due to the ephemeral nature of its particpants, could not rely on fixed servers, how would truly distributed discovery work? Is this possible within the Gnutella protocol? Or is another protocol necessary to support a true "serverless" network?

Thanks,
John Martin