Alternative for anonymity

The way freenet insures anonymity of both the producer and the consumer of
information is by making it difficult or impossible for anyone to determine
whether the computer to/from which they are sending/receiveing a request is the
actual originator/destination of the request. Freenet's method of accomplishing
anonymity results in non-hierarchical addressing of data which means that
finding the data essentially involves a node to node search that could, in the
worst case, require that all but one node be searched. While it is true that
the propogation of data resulting from transparent copying following a
successful search will make future searches potentially shorter, as the size of
the network grows it will become more and more dificult for less popular
(though not necessarily les important) data to be found. Another result of not
having a hierarchical addressing scheme for data is that the data becomes
uneditable, even by it's author. While many clever answers have been proposed
to alleviate some of the problems caused by a non-hierarchical addressing
scheme for data, it seems evident from a philisophical point of view that as
long as nodes only know, at most, the direction in which a particular piece of
data used to lie (and that only if they have encountered a successful search
for the data previously), no algorithm will provide routing choices much more
efficient than random guessing. 

Other anonimity services, such as the Anonimizer, use central servers which act
as proxy servers for their subscribers. The problem with these services is that
even if both the producers and consumers of information subscribe to these
proxy servers, the proxy servers themselves are aware of identity of their
subscribers and thus can be "attacked" in an effort either to eliminate a
source of anonimity or to acquire the identities of the subscribers. 

However, suppose that there were nodes who connected to each other using
existing "tunnelling" technology thus creating a VPN. Suppose further that
these nodes used existing NAT routing technology and acted as NAT routers for
the nodes with which they are connected. With proper protocol design, it would
be imposible to tell whether a request originated with a given node or whether
it was simply acting as a relay node for some other node. In this way data
would be stored using hierarchical addressing, namely the IP address of the
computer which is storing, knowingly or unknowingly, the data, thus solving the
problems resulting from non-hierarchical addressing. Additionally, since the
addressing scheme is the same as that used by the "regular" internet,
interaction with this already existing network of data becomes much more
simplified. Would this arrangement not succeed in providing both anonimity and
ease in locating data?

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