[chord] A research project in Sweden

[Thomas Andersson]

Hello!

I am a student at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm,
Sweden, and I am currently writing my degree thesis.

The thesis is about creating a global Internetbased distributed addressbook
where every person has a persistent unique ID throughout his life. The
addressbook is intended to scale to the whole world with its approximately 6
billion people, so the database must of course be distributed. Also, a person
must be able to control all his information himself (but may choose to let a
trustee handle it).
One application may be that instead of adding a name and a number into your
cellphone you would enter the unique ID. Your cellphone would then fetch the
persons entry (current postal address, phonenumber, email, photo etc) from
the Internet. Twenty years later when you need to contact that person again,
you would just hit "update" in your cellphone, and it would fetch the updated
entry automagically.

The intention is to write and submit an internet-draft to the IETF.
I have looked at Chord as a basis for the addressbook, and there are some 
questions I would be happy if you could answer:

Is the Chord project still under research and development, is it still active?

How well does Chord scale, would it scale to up to maybe 1 billion nodes and 
10-20 billion files? (the files shared in the addressbook are only small
addressbook entries, but there would be extremely many of them)

Is Chord persistant (like PAST) in any way, or could it be made so? Under what 
circumstances could a file disappear from the network?

Best regards
Thomas Andersson