The fee wasn't supposed to be a price, it was supposed to be an additional incentive to show up on time. But instead it replaced the previous incentive instead of adding to it.
They have literally blundered their way into a source of revenue, fail to see it as an opportunity and are resentful of it.
If the fee wasn't supposed to be a price then they shouldn't have made it a price. If they really hate money as much as it sounds they could instead give tardy parents 3 strikes before banning them from the daycare altogether.
Yes, that's what I'm saying. If we replace the altruistic motivation with a monetary one, and we don't have enough money to incentivize people, they will just stop. They won't take the altruistic motivation plus the monetary one.
It's plain to see that altruism isn't enough to keep enough tor nodes going. I've never even considered running one until now because of the real costs and risk it incurs upon me. Now I'm actually considering it because it might be worth it. This is a good thing and there are more people willing do to something for money than people willing to do something out of the kindness of their heart to people they will never meet or interact with in any way.
"As it stands I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of nodes were operated by various national intelligence agencies simply because they have vastly more incentive to do so than anyone else. Potentially being able to profit from this changes things dramatically and gives people who wouldn't consider themselves stakeholders actual reason to 'sell' their bandwidth to the tor network."
It's possible that most of the nodes aren't run for altruistic reasons at all. And are in fact run to datamine the network to discover the identity of people using it.
Paying people won't affect the people who are doing it for altruistic reasons alone, their price is already met. It's just an added bonus for them. But it will have the affect of bringing in additional people who wouldn't have considered it before. The only problem with the daycare's solution is the fact they didn't charge enough to offset the "cost" of feeling bad about being late. To the customers it was a worthy exchange.
Similarly, the tor coin needs to have a value that will offset the 'cost' of feeling bad about not contributing to the network which I know is extremely low.
In the example, the parents picking up their kids on time beforehand were doing so for altruistic reasons alone. When the choice became framed economically, parents started picking up their kids on time less often.
You say they need to raise the fine, but the point here is that it's not economically feasible to raise the reward for running a Tor node indefinitely. The max amount paided out for running a node may be less of an incentive than the existing prosocial incentive to do so.
I think you're missing the point of the example, though. It's not "OMG there is no solution for this daycare" - there is, as you say, an obvious economic solution. It's that it is interesting (and relevant) that the different kinds of incentive don't stack, which is contrary to the naive assumption. Therefore, if the proposed mechanism cannot come up with sufficient money, it might actually make the situation worse - this may not be a "every little bit helps" situation.