I don't think dismissing the potential for security on gnutella is necessarily going help anything. Even if it can't be worked out it's worth a shot. And just from the surface knowledge (read "underlying concepts") I have of encryption and validation techniques I do know there are ways to increase security dramatically in a proprietary system (such as bearshare's secure channels).

I'm doing the best I can to see if these concepts can be applied to something like gnutella without giving so much control to a governing body like the GDF that, given something like a court order, they could shut the network down (as could happen with revokable certificates).

It's a tough problem to tackle and I'm probably not going to be the one to solve it, but I'm not going to dismiss the possibility.

Um, Morg.. in one breath you just complained about the split and in the next you just advocated BearShare leaving Gnutella.. that's what the split is dude.