the thing that's amazing about watching a bittorrent-backed archive take shape is that is works because of not in spite of everyone having a small amount of resources to contribute. A hard drive here, a residential broadband connection there... we're distributing almost a hundred terabytes of data because people decide that something is important to them and take responsibility for it. I'm on a few torrents right now where the original uploader can only upload 100kb/s at a time and loses connections for hours at a time, and the rest of us are just swapping pieces in the mean time catching each other up.