It’s like asking is social welfare a good idea. That which is seen is that it takes some homeless off the streets. That which is unseen… See http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html for the rest.
It is my personal belief that the outcome is that the approach will improve centralization and discourage specialization and as I said above, the result will be more hobby farmers at the cost of sub-optimal service. When I say “sub-optimal” I mean of lower quality than it would be possible. I know for some that cost is worth paying in order to prevent centralization. Based on various comments I concluded centralization will be resisted and is therefore unlikely. I expanded on that here and also in another topic about (not) using RAID, which is what part-time farmers will in my estimate do (because the system won’t be able to punish them enough to discourage vault/data loss).
Read the devs’ comments, all of them are consistent: decentralization and “balanced rewarding” (I don’t know what other term to use) have always been mentioned as important approaches.
I used to comment a lot about this before, but it is what it is. And also from a tech perspective it may be quite hard to collect and process performance stats of all vaults. It seems complicated enough as is (vault age, uptime, etc.) and if you consider how “performance” should be defined (where do you measure it), it clearly becomes very difficult. For example if you are farming out of Brisbane you may have great performance as seen by your GET customer from Darwin, but poor for someone in Finland. And because 95% of your GETs will come from other continents, you should never be able to break into the upper half…
It’s complicated and any direction can have unpredictable consequences. People can participate (or not) based on their own values and interests, so those who find the final approach acceptable will stay.
I think it’s okay to discuss this - the devs can tell us if what is the plan and then we can stop.
We can and should also discuss what would happen in the opposite case (if only above average performance is rewarded). Let’s say only above-average vaults get rewards. So if you drop below the average, you’re f***ed and you can delete everything or “tune” your system or upgrade it hoping you’ll break into the upper half. But no matter what you do on the individual level, at any given time 50% of farmers wouldn’t get any hits, just (free) PUTs, so there would be both centralization/specialization (successful farmers could add more capacity) and a lot of churn (imagine hundreds of TB’s being deleted every week?).
The rebuilding of missing replicas causes GETs. I can’t recall if I mentioned this before, but I wonder if farmers get paid for GETs caused by replica rebuilds. I previously guesstimated the data hit rate could be in low single percents (say, 1 or 2% per month so you get 80 GB of GETs on 8 TB of stored capacity). But if only top 50% (let alone the fastest) of vaults get rewarded, farmers could join and leave en masse and those who stay could get more GETs from rebuilding than from paying users.