I am happy to discuss what are the things you agree and do not agree with me as I would like to broaden my view on this project that in general is to my interest. However, I joined this discussion mostly to ask some questions related to the basis on which the argumentation was outlined here by the company representative with a hope of receiving some answers. It was just @IsThisOn that engaged me into slightly more extensive discussion. I fully agree with you that costs should be taken into account with all appropriate details and if this is not only going to be a hobby / charity project some additional financial factors as well.
Well @Alexey, this is what you are telling here but in fact this is a kind of a line of credit in a financial or business sense especially that the payment is deferred. So if you are going to Forrester and GigaOm telling the story, IMO this fact should not be omitted, especially that the message is also that the pricing is 10 x lower then the competition.
I believe best is to operate with firm fundamentals and for me almost since the very beginning of my presence here some things just do not add up, like for example carbon footprint and possibly reliability thus some additional questions. Should it be the fact, the sooner one realize it, the better.
I would like to add that it seems that The LOTR Team is kindly knocking on your doors and kindly telling you ⊠âwe like youâ.
I donât want to look like I am repeating only one thing, but can you please share some information about how do you plan to move to bigger scale with âuse only unused spaceâ quote?
I mean if Storj will need to get more space from âpublic networkâ (not SOC2 network), how do you plan to ask for it? Do you think that if you ask for âuse only what you have, but share more to storjâ will work? Or do you think more operators will always come so the available âunused spaceâ is unlimited?
Disclaimer: I have nothing against, I just donât understand it and trying not to see future in DCs.
Actually this is a really good question, and I alluded to before that once SNOs leave I would imagine theyâd be unlikely to come back (especially if they left âin angerâ).
I would imagine the answer is that some people may indeed end up buying more storage equipment from the proceeds of their full nodes.
That would certainly be my strategy. If all my 58TB were full Iâd definitely spin up another node. It would not be a âquick winâ but I would gamble that it would eventually pay for itself or even start turning profit.
You will have to invest up front and hope you will get the investment back in lets say 3 years. There are many examples of such setups around and if you look at the numbers it is clear you wonât be able to cover the expenses to expand from the amount you will get paid each month.
If I use a Raspberry Pi4 it utilizes 10 watts under load. An external drive is around 20 watts. I pay 17 cents per kwh. So, that works out to less than $4 a month in electricity cost.
That node has 14tb. With just storage and no egress I earn $15 a month if the payout is $1.50 per TB. In a year, I have earned close to $180. More if you include whatever egress brings in.
Someone with twice the power cost would make half as much but would still earn.
While we tell node operators not to buy hardware, with a thrifty hardware model like the above, many SNOâs can afford to expand their nodes and continue to earn. I am not saying they should, but I know SNOâs are doing this. More data means even more earnings.
I think a couple issues I see, is that the initial TB a new node needs to pay for electricity is too slow to gather. New nodes need a lot more data coming in sooner. But new data gets diluted by the addition of so many new nodes always coming online.
While there have been suggestions to stop new nodes from being created, that is difficult when Storj Labs wants new nodes in other regions of the world where they have few now. They need more here and less there.
It reminds me of Bitcoin in that at first people could earn multiple bitcoins when mining in the early days, but as more and more people mined for coins it eventually became saturated and if you could afford the power you would earn only fractions of coins. I feel like this is where Storj is headed, though the subnet rules help prevent total consolidation. Perhaps geofencing will also eventually create more active pockets to help spread out the distributed nature of the network and prevent it all from looking into operators who have the lowest utility charges. We shall see what the future holdsâŠ
But it isnât, more like $1.61/TB at the moment incl. egress, and usually around $1.59/TB. We also assume here the node will be full from the day one and we all know that is not the case. To fill 14TB drive it will take how long, 4 years? Iâm not taking sides, but I think we should be exact with the numbers here.
Edit: I just couldnât. How did you come up with $2/TB without egress? Are there SNOs having a different payout rates?
Not that long. Last month I had about 1tb ingress. I donât want to get into the various discussions on how data gets deleted so it isnât really 1tb and such. I have read the conversations. I understand. And you donât have to get to 14tb. In my case, I just needed more than 2 to start earning more than my power cost.
I have a node that is 30 months old now and has slightly over 8TB stored at the moment. Majority of the time it didnât share a subnet with anyone else and did run on a redundant infrastructure with dedicated connectivity.
I would be called names in certain circles for spreading false information, and spreading such not exactly correct information to put it lightly, leads to a groups of people to start threatening the company because they were misled maybe, or their expectations were different based on what theyâve read here.
Also that question, how did you come up with $2/TB without egress if you are willing to answer.
Thank you.
Yeah, you guys are right, it is a Monday and I was looking at the energy cost and rounding it and rounded the payout amount, my bad. I will correct it.
So, I appreciate that gaining data three years ago takes longer than gaining data now. Partially because a lot of earlier data wasnât customer data it was test data that has been purged from the network not that long ago. This caused many nodes with a lot of data that is old to see data loss. However, like I mentioned, I had about 1tb ingress this month. I have multiple nodes, as I run tests on SBCâs to see how well they work with being Storj nodes. Most of them do rather well. Some have had issues and come down for fixes and what not and donât do as well.
Anyway, I feel as though data growth will continue to increase but can be diluted due to more nodes coming online. More operators may see faster growth this year than what you had two years ago, and the year after may be even more growth than that assuming Storj continues to onboard large customers.
Itâs all unpredictable really. I look at it from an optimistic point of view. I see things getting bigger and better. Perhaps a lone voice in a thread filled with FUD. But I see big things for Storj and SNOâs who can afford to stick around.
I am certain my comments will be split into various quotes and analyzed and then shredded by the unhappy. But on the whole, the message is that most SNOâs can earn after initially getting enough storage to pay for their power, if they arenât trying to run rack servers, etc.
I agree but do understand there is a difference between Community Admins and internal Storj Labs staff. Admins work in a kind of independent role because we are often your voice to the company. And we try to take what we can from the company and give you feedback. This is not easy on either side because it is summarizing many voices into something understandable. Bre, Alexey and I do our best to manage the forum and provide support. It is not always done with precision, but I will endeavor to be more exact.
I appreciate the effort youâve put into that post. Please do not be too strict about the unused HW rule, if you expect than existing operators should buy HW to provide more space if the network will need it. That should be taken into the account at SNO reward management also. Iâm sure it was, but I think it could be communicated better since I did not get it.
Thinking about it more, I miss clear and updated short and long term company vision, since quite few things changed this year (SOC2 network, payouts, economic sustainability of the model) also with some numbers behind it
Purely my opinion here, but I think this wouldnât need to be debated so much if ingress increased significantly to fill drives faster. The problem is that we have too many nodes. Even if you forget all the repair data that nodes would earn if you slashed the number of nodes in half, the average daily ingress would double. That alone would drive more earnings to SNOâs.
But what to do? If we stop accepting new nodes to come online, we jeopardize having nodes spin up in regions of the world that are under represented. Use some kind of regional limit? Then they would use VPS/VPN to skirt around it.
I think this is really the problem for most SNOâs. It isnât the Egress pricing so much as the slow speed to which their drives are filling. I donât know what the answer is, maybe people here have some good ideas on how to limit node growth in some areas and not in others, or similar approach. That would be a constructive conversation and could lead to positive benefits for all concerned.
As you said, it would be impossible, because whatever solution/incentive/profiling is implemented it will be circumvented by vpn.
The actual solution is well known, is unpopular with a vocal minority of operators, but very effective.
Here is it:
further decrease payouts.
People who still canât comprehend the project will leave to mine chia, stable nodes that participate in the project as intended will stay.
Right now out of the wack with reality crazy payouts attract wrong type of node operators.
Today running node is still profitable. This is bad. This incentivizes buying equipment (I love the analogy above with building SNOBNBs) and then wining on the forum, and leaving when incentives go away. Storj does not want this oportunistic, high turnover kind of operators in the first place at this stage of project evolution. It was necessary to bootstrap the network, but no longer needed.
Today you want stable long term operators that wonât be penny pinching and jumping projects unless you pay for their yacht.
Make it impossible to make money buying equipment on storj and youâll get stable network.
Is raspberry pi + hdd ok? Probably. Itâs up to storj to find the threshold. But whatever it is â even the new payout is still too rich.
Maybe an option would be to give the SNOs an option to provide storage for less or even for free, egress for free etc.
As we saw in the forum, there are people willing to provide their services for free, or at least not to be paid for certain component of the pricing.
This might save company some tokens in the long run and people that do really believe in the project could support it this way as well.
