As an American that has gone through the process, I can confirm that there is a lot of irrelevant junk crammed down our throats and poured into our ears.
If you are trying to achieve encryption, then no, you will not need https, as cjdns is encrypted at every packet be nature.
If you are trying to comply to some other https related standard, then you will need https.
I've never heard of netsukuku until now, but from a quick glance, they are very similar except that cjdns has a much higher usage in the wild and doesnt have an answer to dns.
This is ingenious, your public address is also your public key, and the payload of the packet can only be decrypted by your private key.
So awesome, it has encryption built in.
