Cool. Thanks for the info. I'm in the middle of developing a distributed scraping (HTML to JSON API conversion) for internal use at a company I'm working for and we plan on open-sourcing it eventually. However, before we do, we need to map out all the possible pathologies of such a system, which the two most concerning ones are greedy nodes and preventing usage of the system for the execution DDoS attacks. I'm going to look into "greedy routing".
What is interesting about the literature on designing systems with robustly stable and efficient network behaviors is how restrictive the known solutions to this problem are in terms of how a protocol must be designed. At the same time, it is enlightening to realize that every robust large-scale distributed system employs the mathematics pervasively. Email spam is a predictable failure mode for the SMTP protocol per the mathematics, once you start thinking about it that way.
The most important counter-intuitive idea is that robust distributed protocols are subtractive. You can't design a distributed system around creating good properties per se, you can only design a distributed system that suppresses bad properties. An optimal distributed protocol is one in which the various well-known pathologies are naturally and effectively suppressed by the behavior of the protocol without suppressing aggregate throughput.