Could even start as a virtual private network of sorts.
I have trust with my friend A. They add. Friend B, who I can only see because I know A. If we have a need to talk to each other, then we can proxy through A.
Don’t know exactly how this scales… it becomes a tor network of sorts. But you actually know the peers chaining your requests together to some degree. You get a bad request, you respond that you don’t want communication with that peer anymore. The message hops back through the chain and each peer decides to drop the route for you.
Each peer has their own rate limits, preventing certain floods from happening. One bad actor floods out from many locations, eventually it all connects back toy eh bad actor. Don’t need a vpn on this network, as you’re already tunneling around through others.
How to handle bot nets would be interesting. Basically as nodes detect bad traffic eventually the word gets around to put those nodes into a high risk status. Owners of those nodes would be able to see they’re being restricted. It’s up to them to stop the bad traffic from coming from their own devices.
This idea is still forming…