Farmer and renter retrievability indexes

[MeijeSibbel]

We all agree on the fact that cloud storage prices will continue to drop to the point that just holding data on a farmers's drive will not be profitable for them and that only uploading back to renter will compensate the low storage payout. Say i am farmer (A), i get an average of 1-2$/TB for storage a month, but since i upload about 10$ a month worth of data, i will continue to be a farmer. Now i am farmer (B), i fill all my space, i get 1-2$/TB and zero uploads because my data is coming from a client that only uses the space as backups, it is not profitable for me, i will delete the drive and start over to see if i get data that a renter accesses frequently. How are we going to solve that problem?,

Right now there is no way for a renter to specify say a "retrievability index " (how many time the files will be retrieved again) and there is no way for a farmer to set the min/max "retrievability" index. Adding such a parameter (or adjustable scale) for both a farmer and a renter will allow the network to specialize for certain use cases. Some farmers are very slow and don't want to upload the data back at all if possible, which would imply adding a low retievability index to the contracts, then vice versa for files that are accessed frequently.

[MeijeSibbel]

related to storj-archived/billing#71