Rewards seem nice, yet not everyone who wants to play can pay, or the math overhead is crushing, or it becomes centralized. Definitely worth trying, especially if it fits some usage model. Another form is to just let the network use whatever CPU, RAM, DISK, NET that you're not currently using, or give it whatever limits you want. In short, set it and forget it. Let the network figure out how to best use your node to support the network. Maybe it's a strictly filesharing network, or a general purpose network. That's on the "Hey I just want to donate this because it's cool like Seti@Home, etc." Users actual use of the network would be through different apps... be it submitting infohashes, or compute jobs, etc. Does eliminating all the reward tracking overhead provide substantial resources back to support free use. ie: Most people and their computer resources sit idle, probably more than enough to provide back whatever multimedia they want to consume. If true, all balances out, no need to bother track accounting with "pay to play" style system? I like "pay to play" as it offers at least some firm guarantee to the consumer offeror. But an accounting free system is more fun as in free beer :) Hybrids might work too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exabyte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(data) 100M users donating 10GiB slack space is about 0.93 EiB of non redundant storage, excluding overhead. Example, at 4x redundancy, that probably easily covers lossless versions of all movies (at least 1080p) and all audio (FLAC), all wikipedia, all OS and apps. Approaching mini-NSA scale... not a bad start.