This isn’t a movie, it’s a circus. A performance by trained rabbits. 
Do you work for Storj Labs? Who gives a duck about their select network? We are here for the public network; anything else doesn’t matter to me. I’m also not sure that even the private network will survive without the community. The level of incompetence is scary. It takes them a month just to fix bloom filters. For a whole month, they can’t figure out why every node in the network is losing online score, and some people on this forum are spending their own money on AI agents to try and solve Storj’s problems for them. Who will stay if the public network dies? You, skunk, and the other rabbit? What a company!
Nobody spins up capacity they don’t need. Genuinely idle space exists, but there isn’t much of it, and the network needs far more than that.
Look at the ASNs and IP registrations. I dare to say a large share of the network sits on equipment set up for Storj specifically. Which is the point: capacity beyond what happens to be lying around has to be attracted, and attracting it costs money.
Price as if every operator is donating waste and you keep only the operators who are. That’s a much smaller network than the one Storj is selling.
Less per TB, okay. But paid on committed capacity. No vetting, no held amount, no unpaid trash. Everyone else is paid on used capacity, and not even in full, because 20% or more of what’s on disk sits in trash and earns nothing. And you suddenly have $1.20/TB that only arrives after month 9. BIG difference.
As for quality: we saw the quality when Storj realized piecestore couldn’t keep up on Select nodes and had to build hashstore to work around it. That’s not a problem you hit with enterprise hardware.
Everyone is. By talking about it and then bulding datacenters that will run on gas turbines and coal power plants. And they then jerk up residential rates in hopes people will reduce energy consumption and offset their BS.
Any thoughts on reducing operator costs alongside the payout question? Would Storj consider that for operators providing substantial capacity — vetted nodes, nodes above a certain size or nodes over a certain age as an example?
I talk of course about placement rules.
Judging by the number of bugs and outright errors (like the recent rollout of updates with the wrong cursor), they’ve already switched to a system where programmers aren’t paid and work “at times they don’t need.”
Is the next step to bring in clients who upload data they don’t need? 
Ah, there is already Home - /dev/null as a Service
The public network is bigger than select.
Select is a tiny bit more expensive. Mainly because on select we pay for the entire machine including any free space. On the other hand egress is for free.
Anyway the difference isn’t that big and the new pricing adresses it.
It believe it is a bit early for that. I have tuned my nodes on low costs as well and they are running surpisingly good. Tomorrow morning I am going to share my calculator. Lets not rush to conclusions too fast.
Or, they are just an arrogant rabbit. 
Not fully true. Example source:
Failure rates will be dependent on the total data transferred
Some time ago it was considered. We have everything in place to make that work. I will have to ask the team if they would have any objections. I don’t expect a quick answer. It will take time meaning for now we have to plan without that.
About this, I still wonder how much of that idle space the public network would attract in an approximate tit-for-tat scheme. Like, if prospective node operators are told that storing 2.1 GB of network data would allow them to store for free 1 GB of their own data, then I suspect there would be quite a lot of “slightly” oversized setups at any payment level.
I’m certain most of the SNOs here are to earn tokens. Thus the market for such service wouldn’t be too big I guess. Probably about the same size as SNOs willing to donate their equipment.
I also believe there was a project just like that and it did not survive as far as I remember.
This is probably the key word. This crowd has self-selected after years of specific Storj token and pricing policies. Looking at what happens on, let say, r/datahoarder… plenty of people with oversized setups and wanting offsite backups 
for whom exisiting policies would not work.
The problem is that we (the SNO) don’t understand why you’re trying to save money on us specifically, even though it’s clearly far from the largest expense item. We see the total payments every month. Let’s say you lower the price of a TB to $1.20, that’s a 20% reduction. The last payment for all SNOs was 1,537,086 Storge, or approximately $121,000 at that exchange rate. If you lower the rate to $1.20, the savings will be $25,000, a simply astronomical amount (no, just kidding). In fact, I think such a reduction will drive out a very significant portion of SNOs, and it’s highly likely they won’t even do the GE, meaning you simply risk losing customer data.
I say this because, no matter what the rabbit says, for large SNOs, this is a business, and a business that is ALREADY low-margin. If you lower it even further, so that the savings can be seen without laughing, the result is guaranteed.
I must remind you that prices for drives, including used ones, have risen significantly, and the choice between selling them at the current high price and continuing to operate as a storage network is already difficult. Personally, what holds me back is primarily the fact that I’ve been doing this for six years and have built my own “storage network,” which is simply a shame to kill; it’s like a child you raised.
My friend, who had a similarly sized system, gave up a few months ago. I personally sold his drives (over 150 units) to one buyer in a single day. And he received a very large sum of money up front and got rid of all the problems with your flaky updates and other nonsense.
And after all this, now there’s this “restructuring” of yours, in which I lost a ton of money because I was stupid enough to hold your tokens instead of selling them. As did everyone else, by the way. Therefore, the question arises: wouldn’t it be more profitable to fire those geniuses who brought us to this point, rather than try to milk an already barely living cow?
Not sure offsite is their mentality TBH. But anything is possible.
It is the largest remaining cost.
Is there a way we can verify that claim? That sounds like a dramatic overreaction to me. What I can see is my own calculations and they end with a surprising high revenue for me. With the latest news I am now asking myself would I be willing to give up some of my payout? Would that help to make storj successful? The answer is yes. I would love to run my nodes for years and I am willing to give back a bit of my payout for that. Ofc if storj manages to hit its growth target and asks the community to scale up I would ask for raise the payout rate. That sounds like a fair deal to me. Help storj now and maybe earn from it in the long run. The dangerous alternative might be game over and payout drops by 100%. Compared to that I do see a wide range of reductions that I personally would be happy with.
I guess the part after that is just venting. I don’t see a need to respond on that. Please keep it professional.
Interesting claim - I don’t suppose any employee is working for free? And surely the satellite/backend infrastructure is not cheap either?
I am curious to see more detailed background information on StorJ’s actual “legacy” dept / operating cost / claims etc during the chaper 11 process.
However, I am going to continue supporting StorJ by running nodes through this unfortunate reconstruction phase. I started this as a pet project years back, and it’s grown on me - it’s not just pure business, it’s a journey.
Even if a payout adjustment is required, I would second your vision and see it as an opportunity to help build the foundation for a great product in the future.
Keep fighting 
You probably can’t, because your method of getting feedback is a forum with “rabbits” who say they’re willing to work for free. I’m in a private chat with real SNOs, and they’re, to put it mildly, discouraged by your reasoning. And I’ve been personally observing the “make Storj successful, you just have to be patient” narrative for six years now, starting with $3. Do you need to show the exchange rate chart? You, like the “rabbits”, can do whatever you want, and I speak for myself and the other SNOs I interact with.
In short, I’ve conveyed our community’s opinion. I’ve informed you that there will be exits when the rates are lowered, so do what you want. Again, if you’re calculating “high income” based on the fact that the disk is free and works anyway, and Storj is simply making money out of thin air, then there’s no arguing. You can lower it to $0.10, that’s >$0. But if you add up the price and depreciation of the equipment (even very cheaply assembled), internet channels, electricity, space and time for maintenance, it turns out not so cheap at all.
I have a 3D printer farm, and when customers write to me asking, “Why is it so expensive? This product only has 10 cents’ worth of plastic,” it’s hard to do anything but facepalm. And there are tons of people on the market willing to print for three times less than the actual cost, but for some reason they quickly disappear 
Lets just say I am learning a lot about US labor laws these days…
Most of it has been moved to self hosted. That cost reduction is already done.
I can even suggest an idea: you could remove the completely idiotic and clearly irrelevant /24 filter. And suddenly it turns out that SNO can save on IP rent. But no, you don’t do that; it’s not your expense. “You have to wait.”
Cut the crap. You are an employee, so of course you are interested in keeping Storj alive, even if SNOs get ducked over. You just don’t want to lose your job. Honestly, I hope you do lose it; you deserve it for your lack of respect toward SNOs on this forum.
What a load of bullshit. How many times has Storj Labs raised payouts? ZERO. Reductions are always permanent.