IMO I think we should consider starting with 21 Witnesses @$250-300 pay rate, while also have 10-16 "stand by" Witnesses for redundancy.
I also like the idea having the witness count increase in lieu of increases in market Volume, not market cap.
Market Volume is what puts processing strain on the network, not BTS value (though market cap does have some play in this obviously) hence the reason you'd want to have High Quality and Highly reliable Witnesses running the show!
Therefore paying them well enough makes sense to me
In BTS 1.0 we had a unreliable wallet with a kick ass node system.
With 2.0 rolling out, why the hell would we revert to having a kick ass wallet and a crappy low budget node system?
Defeats the purpose in my mind!
To reiterate my position.... I really, really, really like the idea of scaling nodes, averaged by BTS Daily Volume on a monthly(?) bases. 21min floor witnesses and scale up to 37 (or more when we pass Pluto and are headed to Alpha Omega 9 Sector Z).