Encryption without authentication in this case is as good as XORing all outgoing data with a fixed key. So basically useless...

yes, exactly. BitTorrent supports encryption. swapping it out for some other encryption mechanism won't change anything when it comes to government policing because that's already not where the weaknesses lie for those sharing p2p content today. so what was GP's point?

Doesn’t seem to work, our ISP has sent nastygrams despite this and site on https.

> How will governments police it when MaidSAFE and other systems distribute totally encrypted content?

so isn't the answer then "they'll continue to police it the way they already do"? i don't know what a MaidSAFE is, but the context of this discussion is the DHT, and so public (indexable) torrents, and so however you encrypt the content doesn't matter because you have to provide the decryption method to anyone who asks for any of the previous context (public torrents/indexes) to make any sense.

Encrypted connections shouldn’t decrypt for anyone who asks, otherwise they have no reason to exist.

The weak point seems to be the tracker or filename, but been told https hides that so not sure.