Could you elaborate this part about Storj ?
… and Storj due to a lack of transparency have failed their loyal followers, many of whom run hosts much more for the community than for any hope of ever turning a profit.
Considering your position I kind of feel like this was a foregone conclusion. That said, I think the majority of comments aren’t unreasonable. Yes, I took advantage of surge payouts to expand my node. But even with the cost of HDD’s (which I even partially use for my own stuff) subtracted it has made $1000+. This could have been more if I hadn’t used some of the Storj at a bad time to buy new HDD’s.
I would still recommend new users to not buy hardware. But even if you do, you could definitely run a profit.
With current network activity, the expected income on an 8TB HDD is about $95 in the first year, $350 in the second and $365 in every year following.
In about 15 months you’ve earned back the cost of the HDD. From then on it’s pure profit.
And this is without taking any surge payments into account and based on recent performance.
You’re clearly not going to get filthy rich by running a storage node. And it’s true that I personally value the technology and community more than the income. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also profitable.
Up to 15 months, a percentage is held in escrow. The percentage starts at 75% and decreases with time. When you Gracefully Exit, you get your held escrow amount back from that satellite.
Small correction there. Only the first 9 months is some income held back. 75%, 50% and 25% each for three months. You also didn’t mention that you get half of that back after the 15th month. Since nodes tend to have a slow start the total expected held amount is just over $20 with current network behavior. Half of that will be returned after 15 months. So it really shouldn’t be considered a significant downside.
Source for these numbers is my own earnings estimator, which I adjust with most recent network behavior regularly: Realistic earnings estimator
You mentioned the amount of test data as a downside. These platforms are all just getting started, I don’t think this is any different on any other platform and I’m pretty sure most alternatives have even more test data relative to customer data. In order to determine viability it’s best to look at the product on offer. For now at least, Tardigrade offers to only SLA backed solution for decentralized cloud storage that matches or exceeds performance and reliability of big cloud storage players. And recently we’ve seen quite a few announcements of real customers integrating Tardigrade into their storage architecture. Notably these aren’t limited to projects focused on decentralization or cryptocurrencies. Which shows the platform is viable beyond that.
None of this provides any certainty of viability long term. But given what is out there right now, I would put Storj/Tardigrade very high on the list of viable decentralized solutions.
Yes, I believe there is lack of transparency about amount of test data on the network. When I have seen this concern raised on these forums, it is quickly dismissed as if no concern.
Look at my previous posts for other areas of concern I have raised.
Last topic I saw regarding this we were asked for the reasons we wanted to know this to determine whether it would be worth spending developer effort to implement something. I wouldn’t call that dismissing it…
Sculptex, aren’t you one of the 0chain project authors? Why post a review on the competitor forum?
With Storj, the prices are fixed. The determination of which hosts are used is done by centralised entities, called satellites. I do not know the criteria but assume good performing hosts are favoured.
Sorry but even though some points are fair and accurate, overall this is just bad journalism… The answer to this assumption can be found everywhere on the forum or by asking the devs but you didn’t even care to do proper research.
As seen on his other post on medium. I don’t want to backlink non Storj related post hence excerpt below.
Disclosure:
I am an independent developer and Ambassador for the 0Chain project.
I am an Ambassador for 0chain but have tried many projects. I am giving a faithful account if my experiences. Noone else is doing this.
My comparison matrix article was first to point out that Storj users pay for excess reads, it was as only posted in here after I published that and the website wording was changed also. I was one of first to point out ridiculous misleading host profit calculator on website.
I am not on developer team, I have contributed minor things to official repos (they are open source) but I am independent and have two projects on GitHub as a 3rd party contribution.
OK, at least you didn’t post it from some pseudonym account. Fair enough and some fair criticism in your post.
I corrected the % escrow, thanks for the comments.
Actually, I just searched and it wasn’t that easy to find. But I found Storage node selection which says it’s random. Which actually I would class as a negative as better performing hosts are not bring favoured.
The thing I find the most annoying about storj is that there’s no real award for trying harder than the others. Everyone is treated equally unless its a really crappy provider.
Well at least you found it now. It was discussed in quite a few threads.
Well everyone can have their opinion. Since nodes don’t server whole files like in Sia, the performance of a single host isn’t very relevant and due to overprovisioning the worst hosts won’t make the race to upload/download a piece and are basically “punished” for bad performance this way. So there’s no need to tread different hosts differently.
See post above but additionally: How are you trying harder than others? Having e.g. more bandwidth available doesn’t make a node better than others if it’s never even used, more CPU power would be useless, more space doesn’t tell anything, having UPS might be nice but doesn’t impact a node’s performance…
So how is the storj network supposed to identiy the nodes that are “trying harder than the others”.
I guess it could be based on audits and uptime. While there are lower limits on both that get the node disqualified or suspended, having 100% uptime/audit score and having one barely above the limit does not make a difference in the amount of data you get.
I don’t really think this is a problem though, since the limits are quite strict and the data can still be accessed even if multiple nodes are down.
So, on Sia, the customer has to do his own erasure coding or replication, because if a node is down, he can’t access his file?
I’m not completely sure anymore. maybe it’s not complete files but idk… Maybe someone else can give a clear answer, don’t want to go through their documentation. But as a node you are making a direct contract with customers because you can specify for how much you sell your space/bandwidth. But maybe it’s still stored across multiple nodes.
The big question is how many nodes. because in storj network every piece is stored on so many nodes, the upload bandwidth of a single node is almost irrelevant. An upload speed of a few Mbps would be sufficient at current traffic because the node only uploads a piece of at most 3MB. So in storj it would never be relevant to “make a host popular for its great performance”.
So 0chain is still on test net and you need $50000ZCN and a $4000 server with 100Mb internet AND it is invites only … did I get that right?
oic “blobbers” are like SNOs, those specs are for the blockchain. Blobbers specs aren’t shown
The node selection is random but the long tail cancelation on uploads and downloads is not…