Fascinating indeed. I've occasionally wondered about the feasibility of serving up pages in a BitTorrent-like fashion. Under such a system, each site would have a "canonical server" which existed all the time, but then everyone who downloaded from that server would become an "additional server" which served up those items for some limited amount of time (ten minutes, perhaps?) The hope would be that as traffic increased, the number of additional servers would also increase, such that load on the canonical server would remain at a manageable level. Even sudden bursts of popularity, such as the infamous Slashdot Effect, could theoretically be weathered with a system like this, because with the extra popularity would come a huge number of additional servers.
The biggest problem I see with this kind of system would authentication, not of users but of the pages themselves: how can a person be sure they're getting the actual site? The only way I see of really getting this right is to set up some kind of signature system, such that a site owner can digitally sign the items from his pages to prove that they're genuine. The problem is doing this in a way that's not troublesome for site owners to implement.
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