Do you really need a new cryptocurrency for this? I thought about how to build StorJ many times and at no point did I never need anything more than standard Bitcoin as it exists today.
You don't _technically_. But it is a very good way of funding a decentralized protocol economically. I personally think the ugliness to benefit ratio here is several orders of magnitude lower than something like proprietary software, mandatory fees or, satoshi cyber christ forbid, DRM.
I've thought about this a bit too, my idea for funding it would be to own most of the nodes at launch. So the developers start off with a monopoly, and as the the community grows, more competition is added.
Edit: obviously this would work better if you developed privately and then released the code at launch
