We all agree that once the witness economic model is fixed, protocols like CKBFS could make sense. Before that, we should not rely on witness for data availability.
Another angle from your suggestion came from a friend: a distributed search of witness data by hash and we could use micro-payments to incentivize nodes. Fiber would be a perfect candidate, similar to what Lightning folks did some time ago with video streaming. Node operators would be pretty happy too.
Open Questions:
What is a proven working model for this kind of incentives?
Payment at Transaction mining? (Already in place, they don’t go to nodes but miners)
Payment at RPC Request? (Great for micropayment, not great at defining witness lifetimes)
Micro-payment subscription for keeping the data? (Like your pinning idea, interesting)
How can we tell if the data we receive is actually the right data? (Not tampered)