Cool, thanks for the link. If I understood correctly from your article, supernodes are basically Skype clients that act as distributed servers used for discover

Cool, thanks for the link. If I understood correctly from your article, supernodes are basically Skype clients that act as distributed servers used for discovery of other clients. But I imagine authentication has to happen against a Skype server, and the clients would have to constantly communicate with that server to stay online, to get the current balance, etc... That's 40M requests at any given time. Since it's semi-distributed, and you have to pay for the service (to call a landline or internationally, for example), how does this fit into the distributed model and how do they keep track of everyone?