Announcement: Changes to node payout rates as of December 1st 2023 (Open for comment)

Offering free egress whould be a very bad decision. Customers could saturate our connection very easily, as good or bad behavior. Making them pay for egress is the only thing that protects us. My internet connections are used for daily internet access from other systems too, not just storage nodes. And even you as an endcustomer don’t pay for traffic to your ISP, someone up-the-line is paying for your traffic up and down. Nothing is free. There were discussions on this topic this spring.

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It’s not an unlimited actually. You have two conditions:

  • 90 days of usage
  • fair policy
    See
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If we would follow your advice and only pay storage, I would instantly throttle STORJ to only upload at 10kbit/s max.
Every other node that has a good firewall and some brain would do the same. That is why this is not possible.

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Yeah, “not possible” a great state of mind You are coming from.
Everything is possible in programing!

Storj is a complex project, and it is necessary to look at it holistically to be able to see at all that
the mechanisms involved are interdependent and intertwined on many levels… it is POSSIBLE, with simultaneously measuring if required parameters that SNOs were agreed to, are kept, it was even proposed here long ago.

i don’t say egress has to be completely free for customers,
but could be! - if that would be the decision.

No need to repeat that,

its been debunked some times here on forum

read more than write please, or i will have to repeat my self every single time.

I can even fly in software! Everything is possible :laughing:

But on a serious note: of course it is technically possible. It would just be incredible stupid and totally kill performance.

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Would not kill the performance.
Would bring a lot of data in, if egress would be next to free.
And that data ISN’T KEPT FOR FREE!
SNOs would be filling HDD’s very fast.
isn’t it what SNOs want?
And if some nodes would cap the egress, then DQ,
and more data for the rest of us.
Also no one would want to cap the egress if he would risk being DQ,
if the HDD would fill fast.
Again its interdependent and intertwined
Cant have one, without a bunch of another…

It does not get true by just repeating it. Even your example with the 5mbit minimum Upload requirement, total download for customers would only be 5*80 = 400mbit. And that is best case, assuming you are the only customer on 80 nodes. Urghh…

Don’t disagree. Especially looking at Backblaze and Wasabi.
Still complicated to handle without impacting performance.

Yeah, not sure about that one. I am arguing since two years that STORJ is to expensive compared to Backblaze, scares off none crypto businesses with the crypto bs, misses integrations, wrong marketing and on and on. People seem to be happy with data growth, I think it is not enough.
Either way, just because you make egress free, I don’t think that attracts a huge base. And even if it would, it still would kill performance so we can’t do it.

Please explain how? I already explaind why your proposal does not work. PS: Minimum Download speed is useless, it only affects the nodes themselves.

Please explain how limiting my egress would put me at risk?

Agree. If you attract high traffic users, by making egress free, you have a totally different user group. Then we would see way more upload then what we have now. Currently if you store 1TB, you don’t have 1TB egress a month. What if new users host 1TB that gets downloaded 10 times a month?

HDD performance would also become really interesting :slight_smile:

Ohh, and I would upload movies and share them in FTP groups! I would abuse that system so hard, and there is nothing you could do about that! Have fun paying that S3 bill.

It would put You at risk, if the proposed mechanisms that DQ You, for not meeting the upload minimum required by STORJ, was implemented,
and they are NOT at the moment.

I’ve written really a lot about it in my posts, like in this thread
The whole thread, a discussion with Alex,

And also here, arguing that there PROBABLY would not be problem with egress power from side of SNOs, as we all have very good connections, and a lot of us got 1Gb/s fiber in homes.

Yea, that’s why i dont like the free egress idea without limits.
Either with some limits, or really cheap egress from the start,
eventually like $1-2/TB for customers.
for now, its possible to give them at $2,5/TB rate,
by asking 2 times more for storage BUT 2,8 times LESS for traffic cost.
(from $4/TB stor. and $7/TB egress to $7,9/TB stor. and $2,5/TB egress)

I don’t know if I would do that, but hypothetically, if there was a minimum upload speed required by TOS and actually checked, I would nto be able to shape the upload speed below the minimum. However, there would not be any incentive for having it higher than the minimum either. Right now, I want my node to win as many upload races as possible, so I do not limit its upload speed (the connection speed is only limited by the ISP). If egress was not paid, I could throttle the upload speed of the node down to 5mbps or whatever the minimum is + 10% and keep it there.

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You could. Yes. And for that reason, i still opt for some payment for egress, for SNOs.

Actually, we come close to the situation,
as of egress for SNOs recently went down from $6 to $2/TB,
so some might even start capping the egress already,
and how does STORj can know it?
if they don’t have a mechanism to keep SNOs to their words?
of min. 5Mbps upstream from the agreement?

But still, $2/TB egress for SNOs, and $0,5/TB egress
could be enough to NOT cap.
DEPENDING on how much that egress would be in a total of $ a month,
And if the connection would handle it.
That’s the subject of balance, what those values optimally should be,
for SNOs not to cap the egress traffic.

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backblaze iz not unlimited free egress

*Up to 3x of average monthly data stored.

Cloud Storage Pricing (backblaze.com)

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I think with V2 Storj has learned that whenever incentives of Storj and node operators aren’t aligned, you create a cat and mouse game. Storj wanting to maximize upload speeds, but there being no benefit for node operators would create such a cat and mouse game. Nodes trying to get away with the minimum and Storj trying to still get the maximum out of it in some way. You can try to come up with technical solutions, but it’s a whole lot easier to just have a monetary incentive in place so that nodes benefit from delivering the best service and it would save you all the trouble. That way it’s self optimizing.

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it’s not so well self optimizing at the moment, if the traffic is still low.
(And will be low, if its still for $7/TB IMHO.)
it’s not so well self optimizing, when the pay for egress falls down only for SNOs and not for STORJ inc, and the traffic is still low.
So yea a cat mouse game is played BUT at current state.
That puts SNOs in discriminated positions.
A reforms are needed. But not wanted.
That’s why we had a strike threat recently.
I’m kinda disappointed they did not push more.
That was the only hope to forge a will for reforms.

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I would traffic limit the connection to STORJ test satellites to 6Mbit to meet the requirements and the rest of the node to 10kbit/s.

Got it. I misunderstood you because of this:

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Oh, Nice hint! Thx!
So whatever the programing makes possible, and as we agreed it makes possible a LOT, could be implemented, to successfully corner such capping ideas.
for example. Then some measuring could be implemented in storagenode installer itself on SNOs nodes, so it would measure traffic to random other SNOs.
As far as i know modifying the installer is forbidden in TOS? Despite its open source.
Or can that mechanism can be secured, im not the best tech guy for this specifics, but i know, the anti-cheat detection nowadays is from another level, so the STORJ could implement some ideas too.
Whatever, a solution in programing could be found.

Yea egress could be free if with some limits to meet SNOs capability’s. Those limits could be even ever adjustable. Like not more than 5 times the SNOs storage space, or SNOs could define own number in config file. BUT this option only with HIGHER pay to SNOs for storage/TB, and much HIGHER requires for minimum upstream - so no incentive to keep egress high, penalty only
that’s why i would much likely prefer:

a $1-2/TB egress for SNOs, (and a +15 to 25% margin for STORJ inc.) with combination of
LOW limit like 5Mbps upstream but WITH STILL incentive for as much high upstream as possible, by paying for it, and bringing a LOT of traffic for the network.
And You can’t have a lot of traffic, if it’s relatively expensive, despite STORJ on it’s promo video shows, it’s cheap.

Maybe it’s cheap - for a big guys!
But big guys don’t want it!

because of CERTIFICATES they need, that’s why STORJ created commercial SNOs!
And there You have it, a crazy wheel for classical SNOs,
who are in bad position, hoping that egress will somehow magically appear!
with a price of $7/TB! for a service …
While there are other cloud services, that offers it even for 1,19 Euro egress
and off the street, You don’t have to be big, to sign up for it.

Traffic limiter runs on the firewall not on the node.

How?

You can’t just make things up while simultaniously saying:

You are clearly not.

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i program other things, and i asure You IT CAN BE DONE. To prevent You from capping only test severs, Just like anticheats are made to counter chating in games like bots and hacks. Period. Im out im bussy.

Storj should not mimick idiotic and desperate Backblaze cargo cult stunts, where they try to repeat Wasabis success. I lose respect to this company much further I thought was humanly possible every time they do something stupid like this.

Free egress of 3x data stored is a horrible idea for customers. That means customers pay for some egress regardless of whether they use it or not, based on what other customers use. It just rolled in into cost of storage. No thank you. I’d rather pay for what I use.

Misalignment of incentives was already discussed, and this is the single reason why this won’t work. Regardless of tech solutions. Yes, everything is possible with tech, including defeating any tech measures that go against individual interests.

Today storj cost structure strikes a good balance between verbosity (I.e. not charging per api call) and reflecting actual costs that matter to drive customer and SNO behavior. Hiding one cost in another only makes things more complex, more prone to abuse, and harder to manage; and therefore more expensive.

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haha, thanks for the laugh :laughing:
You never wrote a single line of code, did you?

Anticheats work on the host. To detect stuff on the host.
But I would not limit STORJ on the host. What now?
But I guess I will never get an answer to this, because you are to bussy(sic) coding!

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Keep it civil, boys… :slight_smile:

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