Stanford. Indeed, this is centralization. But as others have mentioned, it's much more like "exchange your CPU time for equity in our security" than it is like "participate in our distributed, decentralized currency." No sustainable decentralized currency could use inputs like protein folding, SETI, etc.

Counterparty is really innovative, and this is a great way to leverage it. Unfortunately, it's really easy to confuse with typical altcoins which really use miners.