There probably is no reasonable way to implement a P2P authentication system. Either a single machine has to know about all users or everyone has to know about all users. Otherwise it's a crapshoot.
Even the content on FreeNet will be damaged or eliminated if enough nodes go down and it cannot be accessed or found. That's just because no single node has all the content; if every node has the total content, you have to worry about bandwidth (to synchronize), etc; if every node holds a piece of the content (overlapping and duplicated of course) then you have to worry about data going missing, or maybe just becoming unreachable on the network (ttl running out).
This is a very difficult problem because you can't treat the P2P network as one big distributed computer. The environment is too fluid, too unreliable. Nodes come and go. They have various levels of bandwidth available (nearly always too small for our purposes). Even if you could somehow pull it off, how would you store this data? It would quickly become too large an amount of stuff to shuffle around and query and update non-stop.
My opinion: cannot be done. Of course, I'm no scientist, and don't even play one on TV.
As for machine-friendly unique IDs... there's always the GUID, guaranteed to be unique when generated. Then again, that's hardly an issue, user ids would also have to be unique, no?
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