I like this as a 'tech demo' but i think they are some serious pitfalls if something like this was used.
1) Issues with privacy, leaking information to other peers about who's on the website etc doesn't sound good at all, neither for me as the site owner neither for my users since it could be potentially used as a method for them to be tracked.
2) In 2013, its easy and inexpensive to serve any kind of static files, videos are quite big and that might be the only valid case, however...
3) If you used this to stream video, it would require a great number of seeders for videos to buffer fast and start playing with no iterations.
4) How much of your user hard disk are you going to take over to store your things? Are you storing content that is outside the context of there current page?
I could go on and on, i see so many issues with such practices but here is the most important:
Your users will hate it, they will hate being used in such a manner, they will hate there upstream being used, they will hate there hard drives being used. They will hate you.
1) Issues with privacy, leaking information to other peers about who's on the website etc doesn't sound good at all, neither for me as the site owner neither for my users since it could be potentially used as a method for them to be tracked.
2) In 2013, its easy and inexpensive to serve any kind of static files, videos are quite big and that might be the only valid case, however...
3) If you used this to stream video, it would require a great number of seeders for videos to buffer fast and start playing with no iterations.
4) How much of your user hard disk are you going to take over to store your things? Are you storing content that is outside the context of there current page?
I could go on and on, i see so many issues with such practices but here is the most important:
Your users will hate it, they will hate being used in such a manner, they will hate there upstream being used, they will hate there hard drives being used. They will hate you.