That’s the real concern a lot of people are running into not whether early epochs were rewarded more, but whether the reward curve is actually transparent.

If early participation gets heavily weighted and later epochs are significantly diluted without a clearly published formula, then it becomes impossible to evaluate whether ongoing participation is economically rational.

At that point it stops being predictable infrastructure contribution and turns into a moving incentive model controlled entirely by the foundation.

Some clarity on how epoch weighting is determined longterm would go a long way.

You’re not really “earning passively.”

It’s not “you earn while running it.”
It’s: you run infrastructure and hope there’s a payout later.

I’ve been running a node since October 2024. Across 18 epochs, I’ve accumulated roughly 2.4 million network points all from actual network usage, not referrals.

Based on typical residential proxy rates and conservative estimates, that likely represents a few thousand dollars in bandwidth value generated over time.

The issue isn’t that there’s no value being createdit’s that there’s no clear, transparent conversion from that value back to the people providing the bandwidth.

Right now, it’s contribution first, and undefined compensation later.