You are right: This needs to be a fully decentralized system, with no center, and processing happening at the nodes. I was conceiving of "regional" aggregates mostly as a guess as to what may relieve network congestion if every node calls out to thousands of others.

Thank you for setting me right: My thinking has been so influenced by over a decade of web app dev that I'm still working on integrating the full principles of decentralized systems.

As for boiling oceans... I wish you were wrong, but you probably are right. Some of these architectures are likely to be enormously hard to fine-tune for effectiveness. At the same time, I am also hoping to piggyback on existing standards and systems.

Anyway, let's certainly talk offline!