Customer choice (handpicking nodes)

[arjunhassard]

There are 'legitimate' reasons to handpick Ursulas, such as:

• Regulation requiring that consumer data remain in a certain jurisdiction [although the extent to which this applies to the ciphertext of a symmetric key associated with the underlying data is unclear]
• Regulation requiring data storage to comply with some criteria (e.g. HIPAA)

However, even where prices are centrally-set and uniform, there are other reasons to prioritise jobs to certain Ursulas. Developers/users can find each Ursula's address and use this to discern:

• historical uptime, expressed in terms of the total cycles where their activity was confirmed (i.e. checking to see if they missed a reward)
• any punishments received (checking for slashes)
• typical latency (this can be tested)
• size and length of stake (i.e. how much they have to lose, how committed they are)

We must consider this 'market information' and how much we encourage, enable or attempt to hide.

• How much of an edge case will discretionary choice of Ursulas be? 
In other words, how many of our adopters are likely to do this?
• What impact does this have on the market and Ursula behaviour, particularly in demand-scarce epochs?