I think I see what you're saying, but I still spot gaps. First, the "subnode scenario" is not right. You aren't paying for transit that's costing more than you're making in revenue. The whole point is to get a smaller subsection of the blockchain data and only serve it to customers *when they pay for it*. That way, whatever my egress costs are as a sub-node, they are covered by usage. Second, there are three practical problems with the idea of miners serving the data. - Miners have to distinguish between free data and valuable data. If they mistake valuable data for free data, they'll eat huge costs (and if they end up charging for the data after-the-fact, that can cause problems for whoever was using it). It seems to me that specialists (sub-nodes) would be best at determining which data will be highly demanded. - Miners need the software infrastructure for charging for access to the data. I don't see this anywhere. Everything I see looks free to access, which is inevitably going to cause problems. With the sub-node model, miners can just focus on transaction processing and leave the data-servicing to others. - If there are businesses that depend on this data, they could run into serious problems if the miners are not allocating sufficient time and resources to serving all data. In the sub-node model, there would be specialists dedicated to serving that data, and the practical reliability would be far higher. In the near future, I just see too many things to juggle for miners trying to serve as universal data hosting. Perhaps in the very long run, but not now.