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.