I am very much not a large SNO… 
I don’t see how this is a flaw. The nodes are mature and vetted (we still have to “earn” the vetting by proving they’re in a reliable enough machine), and can be quickly deployed if the network requires the added capacity.
Seems like a win-win to me
Well, the flaw is this:
You can start many SN’s at once, with any size starting from 5GB. You can let them mature 9 months, with practical no ingress (so no held back payments). After those 9 months, you can expand the node and receive full payment. In case of disqualification (due to failure or user choice), there is actually no held back amount to make up for the repair traffic. So also no reason to it for graceful exit instead of just killing your node.
So, the simple logic would be to keep always as much back as is needed to repair ($2/TB), and balance this every month again.
Ah, I hadn’t thought of the effect of “gaming” the held amount system. Well spotted.
I would posit that this is unlikely to be a big problem. If you’re the sort of person who is going to the trouble to have “incubator” nodes, then you are unlikely to be the sort of person who’s in this of the short term gain and will quit unexpectedly (but obviously not impossible, situations change).
In my mind, the “Held Back” system is there more to weed out the short-termers and less for a financial reason.
The other thing to consider is whether these “incubated” nodes are actually size-constrained on their growth. I would argue that if you run them no smaller than the stipulated minimum 500GB (and I do) you will not hit the size limit in the first year (certainly not with the historical ingress we’ve had so far), or if you do it will be quite late so the difference in held back amount is minimal.
But that’s definitely something I hadn’t considered, thank you
I tend to doubt it, this node had been started this month:
Expected to be full within 2 months.
This one actually had been fired up in February, already hit the rim twice. Due to recent garbage collection, it’s not filled to the rim now.
You’re welcome, so much gamification here… 
Ah, yes. But I was careful to write that I was assuming the historical ingress rates. The last few weeks have been an anomaly, so it’s hard to make predictions based on them
But perhaps I’m being a tad too pessimistic. Either way, I doubt it’s a big problem for the network and being able to quickly deploy more capacity is probably more beneficial to the network anyway.
Do you incubate all nodes on one disk? Like do you have a dedicated drive only for incubators?
I don’t, these are real nodes on some old micro-SD cards or old SSDs (so earnings are just over the equilibrium of electrical power costs in my area). If necessary I can relocate them to another disk in the future, but isn’t necessarily the intention of these nodes. May reside on these partitions forever.
I made a suggestion about that, but i guess other things have priority. Storj knows about this flaw.
Well, so it’s up to them then.
It works both sides: if you follow the ‘normal’ path and don’t expand your node, the held amount will be much more than $2/TB. I still have a 2TB node (my first) with for example $18TB held back. But I also have 4TB node (expanded later), having only $5 held back.
Both probably will be in the network till the underlying disks die. And actually, I think the held back amount should shrink proportionally over time; because it’s kind of logical without any bad intents if a node fails after 5-10 years.
But, as I see stories on the extremely slow graceful exit, I’ve already decided never to chose that option the way it is now and just to kill my nodes if I need the disks for another purpose. Regardless the held back amount, I’m not gonna wait months for it to happen.
@jammerdan is not a guilty, they running a tiny weak thing Odroid HC2 with only 1GB of RAM and perhaps a big HDD, this device just cannot sometimes survive the load.
Now the Graceful Exit is fixed:
You just need to keep it online 30 days and it will not produce any stress or risk, while it’s online and then just receive your held amount back.