pesky to/from/subject/etc headers.
Oh boy, here we go. Those are hidden by use of TLS.
Have you not been following the weaknesses intrinsic to SMTP discussions? Yes, they are hidden in TLS transport on the wire. No, they are not hidden in core or on disk at the intermediate and final message transport nodes. That's bad. We want all human relevant plaintext content, such pesky headers included, to be hidden from observation by anyone other than us (at our origination or final receipt nodes). There is no oh boy in that sensible new design.
Regarding government wanting your data in the clear by requesting it to the ISP you use, well switch your communications to another country, problem solved.
Have you ever heard of MLAT, extradition, interpol, public and private cooperation, dealings, and other such things? And maybe you simply do not trust any 'country' with carriage of your insistent plaintext. There is no such 'solved' with that.
- voluntary 'cooperation' to do the same. - capability for messaging over encrypted anonymous p2p overlay networks so that the only real place left to compel is the investigated user themselves (or millions of users if you want to fight up against free speech / privacy).
p2p is no panacea, it doesn't scale
and it will never, ever be able to handle the latest netflixy app Joes are so much into.
I believe it could. Even if requiring super aggregating nodes of some sort. Layers of service of the whole DHT space. More research is surely required. p2p is for techead kids like you, not for the masses. We are talking messaging, not bulk data. However, once you have the nodes scalable to millions of communicators, there is probably no issue transporting bulk data among a select few along their path metrics. Cathal brings up a great and tricky issue regarding choices to store-and-forward. S&F is quite more complex, but possibly more useful, than realtime.
The masses do not understand it unless it brings spiderman, batman, faggotman hollywood garbage faster to their living rooms.
I agree such garbage is rather pointless life endeavour. I would be happy to message you via such a new messaging system though :)