Yes, this means centralization in some ways, but I don't consider that all bad, when the network remains dynamic. What I was trying to explain was based on Unregistered's assumption that the main gnutella host cachers would fail. An improved hostcaching algorithm could ease things up in that case. Today the hostcaching thing works fine indeed, as long your client keeps running, but it won't work if you disconnect for a day or two and try to reconnect only with the IPs in your hostcache (this isn't a problem, as long there are the main host cachers you can connect to).

I'm sorry, I thought you actually meant to encrypt the file before sending it.
Which would be more trouble than it's worth (like encrypting divx-movies or other large files...). Btw Authentification can also work with sending a simple password - which is more like what I was thinking of, although that would not be very secure.

I meant instead of using Gnutella&Encryption to let others download private messages you should use eMail with PGP.

As for the GnutellaForum. I came up with some ideas I wrote down today. This is nothing serious yet, but it might become something. - I had the idea of using the LimeWire-Sources to develop a very basic client for this forum, if it worked out (since I wanted to practice some programming anyway).

ftp://whitedragon.dyndns.org/Gnutell..._prealpha.html