It is. It's a common misconception that peer-to-peer is only about making the handshake symmetrical. Equal contribution of resources is the important thing. In the case of most peer-to-peer technologies, this contribution is in bandwidth, storage space, and tiny routing computations. In the case of seti@home, the contribution was cpu cycles.
Look at the 2 images on the right :) Seti@Home nodes connect only to the main server. They never see or hear anything about other nodes either. If the servers died the network would die.
But I second the Folding@Home prompting - a great cause!
Isn't this bordering on illegal? It sounds like they want to resell one ISP's bandwidth to another. As I understand it ISPs are already upset about bittorrent because it circumvents their commercial upload services by hijacking consumer bandwidth.
It's letting consumers resell their bandwidth on-demand to (I suppose) whoever needs extra I/O right now.
Frankly, I love the idea of reselling bandwidth, it's reminiscent of selling power back to the grid.
As for upload speeds/services, I think that's all going to go away pretty soon -- the DSL/FIOS/Cable wars are heating up (at least here in NYC) and they're starting to compete in upload bandwidth. AFAIK, cable-internet systems are usually built with an asymmetric bias for downlink speeds, while the other two aren't.
Quite weird indeed, but I figure by ISPs he means hosting providers. Something like earning money to offer legal content through BitTorrent would be quite interesting.
