There have been a couple proposals floated for ways to increase our confidence in alternative incentive mechanisms for filecoin in evaluating evolution / changes to the incentive program. One current proposal is that an experimental network can be spun up in parallel for a fixed period of time with a compatible PoRep where data being onboarded to filecoin can also be opted-in to being opted in to the experimental network. Then based on the subset of the network that participates in the side net we can evaluate the outcomes of the alternate mechanism.

Building incentivization systems to ensure data availability has turned out to be a tricky problem. This document is meant to describe the building blocks that compose such a system, and the constraints that have been observed in their design. One of the major hurdles that the Filecoin decentralized storage network continues to grapple with is how to align the network with user understandable retrieval properties.