It seems to me that finding people to communicate with (trust) is the hard part, and actually communicating with them is the easy part. The opennet allows you to not have to trust people, since everything is anonymous, and thus solves the hard problem (in addition to the easy one). The friends network solves the easy problem (communication) but doesn't help with the hard problem (finding people to trust).
There is one change that I think would be good: Make it impossible to construct any given file from any given node. This turns deniability into impossibility (ie. someone can't say "the file was on the drive, and it was encrypted" they can only say "part of the file was on the drive, but we had to get the rest off the internet to get the file"). This seems to have a better chance of standing up in court. In other words, never let a given node hold any complete file. --- John
