While it sucks that the drop for egress is significant (and certainly bigger than I was hoping for), I do recognize that especially for older nodes, the actual payout difference won’t be that big. And I appreciate the promise that payouts are no longer expected to drop further. At least we know what we can count on now.
Payout totals I would guess. Younger nodes will be hit harder by this if looking at the ratio. My older nodes will not feel a big impact at all. I do hope they do something with the held amount to compensate new node operators more, as the impact is felt there much more and they already make so little due to held amount.
As mentioned above, the impact is quite minimal for my payouts. Though I have been reevaluating some of the smaller HDD’s I’ve been running for a while. At this point my intention is to at some point migrate those to larger HDD’s which will have a better cost/income ratio. I don’t plan on stopping them, although I know I’m running some at a loss currently. They were already running at a loss prior to this change. I’m just playing the long game there to avoid having to go through vetting/held amount when larger HDD’s become available to me.
It’s definitely worth for Storj to look into that further as well in addition to the numbers they have provided. Enough nodes, but clustered in a few geographic areas would not be good either, for both performance and reliability.
It’s not greedy to want some compensation for the efforts you put in. But I think small compensation is justified for the reasons you mention. You can still run a profit almost everywhere in the world, if the only cost you have is the power usage of the spinning disk. In my case even enough to buy and additional HDD from time to time. However, at this point you do kind of have to be willing to donate your time setting things up. If I would have been paid my normal salary for the hours I spent on Storj, I would have made a lot more money than just running my nodes. But it’s a learning experience and fun for enthusiasts. And also, I spend much more time on it than I have to to just run the nodes. I helped a friend set up a node on their NAS years ago and they never looked back at it and it has been quietly making money for them in the background on unused resources. I doubt they have even checked their wallet in years and it’s not in their way. So they’s probably be happy to see +/-$200 they didn’t know they had. (It’s a small node)
Well, it hasn’t happened yet. But if an exabyte scale customer comes along, Storj would have no choice but to tell them to look elsewhere right now. Same for the larger petabyte scale customers. It would require quite a bit of organic growth to be able to accept those with open arms with the current strategy. I do think that’s a downside of this approach, but it might be the only way to balance price vs pay at the moment. There’s nothing wrong with growing slow and steady, but that’s what it will be for the foreseeable future as it stands.