Possible PoChurn Benefits?:
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farmers are paid continuously for storing data, so even though for the user it’s a one-time store fee, for the farmer, they are always getting a reward commensurate with their costs - they don’t have to worry about the long term cost of indefinite storage. While the latter may be true anyway as the user will just pay whatever the farmer demands, I think the psychological comfort of a continuous payout is MUCH better for the farmer. Especially now that pay on get is going away presumably.
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built-in long term data holding incentive - farmer isn’t paid until end of cycle, so no risk of getting paid then flushing. I know the process of getting to the farming level is long and their is a strong incentive to keep data, but this adds another even stronger incentive.
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separation of client and farmer is perhaps good legally. If there is some way to unmask the client and the farmer who stored their data but the farmer is paid by the network, and not directly by the client, then there is a reasonable denial of responsibility for the storing of data that a particular government may find repugnant. Also direct payment to the farmer by the client could possibly be useful is such an unmasking attack in the first place.
Hmm, so that may negate that last benefit I thought was there - as payment will still be from client to farmer, not elder to farmer … it’s just a cached payment. I don’t think that’s gonna work for a pay on churn anyway as pay on churn means unlimited payments, not a one-time payment. So elders must be able to hold actual tokens themselves for pay on churn, in the same way as pay on get.
I appreciate going for the simplicity of no relaying or caching.
I don’t grok the Seven though … 7 … days in a week? Why Seven? Why not a fluid adaptation with some hard limits at either end based on insufficient elders at the low end and networking limits at the upper end? If this were a human group I could understand as there are severe limits to human communication, and this is also true for computer messaging, but seven seems a very small number (as the hard limit) for computer networking. Even if it were to be a fixed number of elders, why not 70, or 700? I’m curious as to the reasoning here? … @dirvine
I wonder if a small or known/fixed limit might aid attackers somehow … just my crappy intuition though. Perhaps it’s too late in the game to be considering these things, IDK.
Well there ya go … score one for my intuition! 
I assume that elders are being pushed out (euthanized!! lol) and adults are replacing them regularly - doesn’t this mitigate such an issue? Also goes back the 7 number I suppose … more may be better in terms of adult-elder rotation.
Farmers, adults & elders may want to use a VPN for the sake of better anonymity in the end. It’s an extra hop which would add to network latency, but that would probably to worse if extra hops were internal to the network as professional VPN’s are pretty good for speed.
On the surface I think this has good merit, but many clients may have data and/or bandwidth limits … plus there is no reward mechanism for doing this. It’s one thing in a network of torrenters who are sharing and there is no payment involved, it’s another thing when you are paying to store your data forever and then the network just can’t seem to do the job without a continuous lend of your resources … it doesn’t inspire confidence.
Perhaps if there were to be a PoChurn and/or PoGet, and many more elders in a section then network could replicate data on demand to have a much stronger torrent-like effect.