Patent ID: 8683020

Claim:
A method performed by a computer system for publishing information in a distributed network without a central management infrastructure, comprising: receiving an indication of a new node and a destination node, the new node omitted from a contact list associated with the destination node, the contact list having a logarithmic distribution(c log d) of neighboring nodes; introducing the new node to the destination node via a permanent circuit; and causing the destination node to add the new node to the contact list when adding the new node improves the logarithmic distribution (c log d) of neighboring nodes, wherein K=hash(N) and is a value in a key-space, wherein for each value d between 0 and a key-space size, N d is a number of entries in the contact list for N whose keys are a distance less than d from K=hash(N), such that N d is defined as: N d =|{N′ such that|hash( N )−hash( N ′)|< d}|<c log d wherein c is a constant, and wherein the inequality states that the distribution of the keys of the entries in a node N′s contact list occur increasingly sparsely at greater distances from the hash value of N.