Totally agree with @Pentium100: Home users have non-professional connections that just drop time to time. I experienced an Internet cut-off for more than half a day once, and we do get smaller interruptions regularly (of a few hours).
That would be immensly frustrating (and unfair in my opinion) to get disqualified after months and months of service, just because our ISP failed at some point. That would be very discouraging for me!
I’d rather have temporary penalty (reputation, lower trafic…) because of a failure I’m not responsible for than to be completely banned.
I do understand however that the Storj network needs to ensure that no data is lost.
What about:
- Stop accounting storage while a node turns out to be offline
- Quickly start to repair data (say after a couple of hours?): I imagine this process to be quite time-consuming?
- The longer you’re offline, the more your reputation takes a hit
- If you get offline for a very long time, the escrow process could kick back in progressively too, why not
If the node is offline long enough for all the data to be repaired elsewhere, putting your node back online would empty it as it would now contain only superfluous data.
And from then, its reputation should restore itself slowly with time.
But really, disqualification should be the last thing to happen when a node has been offline for a very long time, like it’s been abandonned (for several months).
And even then, I’m not even sure it’s positive to have any disqualification process: If a very old node were to be put back online after months of disappearance, it could be simply treated as a new Node, with no reputation and the escrow process active.
Your views?