I was thinking the same thing, and I don't know enough (or anything really) about this to comment to this, but my second thought was that this probably works li

I was thinking the same thing, and I don't know enough (or anything really) about this to comment to this, but my second thought was that this probably works like bittorrent, where you don't need all of a file to make sense of the individual pieces. Let's say for instance that the file you're downloading is a long text file containing a novel, but all you care about is chapter 3. Then all you need are the pieces for chapter 3 – the rest can stick around in the ether somewhere. This is harder to do with bags of bytes obviously – how do you know which bytes belong to chapter 3? – but if the pieces are self contained messages where you don't need either the previous or the next to make sense of it, then it should be trivial to link to them and the distribution could work like this. Whether it actually works like this or not I have no idea. Sounds like an interesting project anyway!