may i interrupt you with
Click to unroll (not want to take forum space, but want to reply publicly)
Thatâs a question for STORJ inc. not us, SNOs.
But i think No. i absolutely donât believe in STORJ as a backup solution as its main job.
Because as You noticed, reliability: hard to predict if its gonna exist 2,5,10 years from now.
if network has only 23k nodes, (and no rapid increase.)
If it had 500k nodes?
then it would be much better to trust, but again, You wonât have so much if You pay SNOs too little, and You need small SNOs for that, a 4-10TB HDDs in mass, to achieve big network,
and small SNOs have nothing to look after here with current pay rates.
And MAYBE, all it takes is to just set Reed-Solomon from 2,75 to 2
and pay SNOs 2$/TB storage (instead of $1,5/TB)
to open doors for network growth (SNOs numbers, not only nodes),
with slashing prices for egress at the same time = more customers, and You have space and performance to welcome them!
Not like currently, where STORj tryes to magically spawn SNOs in affrica, lol
not with that payout rates Pals!
I think STORJ future purely relaying on entertainment content.
Video content.
Game content.
Apps content for mobile.
or other words, all that content, mass served for masses, whatever it will be.
This is where MONEY is, this is where NEED lays.
None of this backup Bulls**t.
Where price for 1TB egress matters, if its 6$ or 4$.
Critically matters.
So companyâs are interested in less and less cost for content hosting.
Where a savings of 1$/TB = tens of millions in savings at scale.
how much does Netflix pays for space and traffic?
how much does Youtube pays for its videos to host?
How much does Rumble pays for its videos?
Do You have solution for them?
You do, but You have to lower the price of traffic!
For that use case, so high Reed-Solom isnât even needed!
I still think it is very high. Even if you calculate in bad luck, I would guess that the network could at least loose 10% of all nodes without data loss.
Filewalker is still a huge problem for none cache users and RAIDZ users that donât understand parity penalty. With minimum chunk sizes of 4mb we donât have these io intensive small files.
It does. If you start a business you are paying some fees like for the trade register. It is lost no matter what you do. You will not get it back. But the longer you hold to your node, the less money you loose. If you start a new company every year, you pay that fee every year. If your company exists for 3 generations, you only paid it once.
Every time my 1TB node goes belly up, I loose 8$. If I loose it once a year, that is a bigger loss than losing it once every 10y.
No. Calculate it.
You are at month 7. You have 7TB. 56$ balance, 56$ hold back.
Now you can either
A: Like you supposed, create a new node and stop ingress on the old
B: leave it
For A:
The old node stays at 7TB. You earn another 14$ on the old node. That totals to 70$. You get 14$ paid out. You also have a new node with 2$ balance and 8$ hold back.
For B:
Node grows to 8TB. You earn another 16$. That totals to 82$. Hold back grew to 64$. You get paid 18$.
Even for GE, you are better of using your old node.
For A: You would get GE 1$ from the new node and, 28$ GE from the old node
For B: You get 32$ GE
Jup, that and CDN are the reasons STORJ will never work for website downloads.
Sure you need S3 for S3 stuff, but we canât offer it competitively. JetBlue also needs planes to operate, that does not mean BMW should sell planes to JetBlue 
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I agree. But that applies to almost everything we discuss here in the forum. Still fun to debate.
So slow, big files without backups. Yeah that could work.
Then I go to Backblaze or Cloudflare, where I pay way less for egress.
Nothing, thanks to cache servers. ISP can get cache servers for free from Netflix if they agree to some legal stuff like, you will change HDD in a 72h period.
same
there already is a cheaper and better solution. It is called cache servers. No way you can compete with these prices. Also the peering topic plays into that. And that is a huge topic I am not getting into, but it also explains why performance for STORJ will never be great. You will be surprised how little bandwidth ISP A and ISP B peer directly, how much goes through exchanges, and how much exchanges cost.
We had the funny situation in Switzerland. Biggest operator Swisscom (formerly state owned) tried to push its own Netflix competitor SwisscomTV. So they did not use cache servers from Netflix. You could not stream a 15mbit stream from Netflix on a 1Gbit Swisscom fiber connection. I am not kidding! After a huge backlash in the media, they gave in. But it just shows, that bandwidth alone means nothing.
If I stream a video from Netflix, I am not connected to some server in California. I am getting the file from a PoP (Point of Presence) that is 1km away from me.
Well i think the potential is there.
We are at the back of ISP, right?
So technically, its like the ISP already had HDDs (we, the SNOs have them)
So why Netflix shall fund new HDDs and take all the costs (as they only buy brand new right?)
if they can use what is already there? (if needed SNOs can get some used ones,
thanks to STORJ network magic and noone loose any data,
even with some hypothetical high disk failure ratio)
They could rent whats already there as low as $3-4/TB/mo TOTAL, its $576 for a 12TB HDD/year, theoretically they could buy it brand new SAS ultrastar for $200-270, but is it really cheaper when to ad all costs? electricity, maintenance, infrastructure? Those HDDs need other parts to work, entire computers⌠so the building blocks are there,
its the matter of what to build from them.
i stated that there even could be cost free egress, if You pay SNOs like $2/TB per storage.
and on top of that +20%, +50% to STORJ inc.
But You have to watch SNOs if they behave to the agreement, i know i would be super grateful to earn $2 per TB storage, and would be willing to give as much bandwidth as possible in return.
But in order to shield Your self from bad actors, You would need to establish a requirements and enforce it. And put additional requirement, like minimal wining ratio example: 60% daily.
To make sure node donât cap upstream drastically, against other nodes.
Most people wonât bother cheating to be honest.
People are generous, IF YOU pay them well, they are grateful, and willing to go extra mile for You then!
And if S3 is standing on a way to that, then get rid of it eventually!
I mean⌠youâre wrong. 1.2 isnât even high on a local RAID array, where you are in control of the HDDâs and they run in a highly trusted environment. And this time I did do the calculation. Is you lose 10% of nodes in a 29/35 RS scheme (1.207), youâd lose roughly 5.5% of data. Thatâs a deathblow.
In fact if you want to ensure 11 9âs of durability, you canât afford to lose more than 0.5% of nodes in that scheme. So I was wrong, it isnât in the very low single digits. It doesnât even get into the single digits.
Okay, sure. But how would you enforce that? Blocking customers from uploading smaller files?
Ehh, I see what youâre getting at now, but a few comments on that. The longer you hold a node, if itâs growing, the more money you lose in your suggested setup. And Iâm inferring that you mean to prevent people stopping their node and starting over several times. There is already a massive penalty for that in losing all paid data. Compared to that, half the held amount is not going to matter. And I think if Storj would look into this, theyâll probably confirm that the data shows this doesnât currently happen to begin with. The choice people make is, will I keep going or stop? Not will I keep going or start over? And for that first choice, there is no incentive from money youâve already lost.
I mean, sometimes analogies donât work. What we need is competitive pricing for native implementations. So just charge $4 for native egress and add a $4 additional charge for using edge services. Why not find out by differentiated price models whether customers find it worth it to switch? Get them on board with cheap S3 and low migration costs. Entice them from there to use native and save money. Best of both worlds. And you can start doing this now, even if some use cases donât work with native only.
Or since Storj also has to pay for edge services on ingress, charge $2 for edge services for ingress and egress. Make the customer feel the cost difference. Perhaps it is possible for customers to upload native, but not download native. They could switch at least on the upload side. The customer now thinks S3 is free, so why not use it?
Yeah, Netflix and Youtube are such a different scale. And they can basically threaten ISPs with the promise of high peering cost and network congestion if they donât host cache servers for them. Itâs a different world and a scale that Storj canât handle anyway. Think a little smaller. Maybe floatplane or curiosity stream? Services like that might work. But you still have the web integration issue.
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Initial conditions:
- My node has 7TB. 56$ balance, 56$ ($29) hold back.
- $0 in my pocket (letâs ignore the previous earnings).
- Node grows by 1TB every month.
Option 1 - I leave the node running:
Month 8 - 8TB, held back $64 ($32), I earn $16, balance $56+$16=$72, I get paid $8 ($8 in my pocket)
Month 9 - 9TB, held back $72 ($36), I earn $18, balance $64+$18=$82, I get paid $10 ($18 in my pocket).
Month 14 - 14TB. held back $112 ($56), I earn $28, balance $132. I get paid $20 ($98 in my pocket)
Month 15 - 15TB, held back $120 ($60), I earn $30, balance $142, I get paid $22 ($120 in my pocket)
Month 16 - 16TB, held back $128 ($64), I earn $32, balance $152, I get paid $24 ($144 in my pocket)
Option 2 - I start a new node, stop growth on the old.
Old node stays at 7TB and consistently makes $14/month, all of which I get paid.
New node starts at zero
Month 8 - 1TB, held back $8, earn $2, balance $2, paid $0+14 ($14 in my pocket)
Month 9 - 2TB, held back $16, earn $4, balance $6, paid $0+14 ($28 in my pocket)
Month 10 - 3TB, held back $24, earn $6, balance $12, paid $0+14 ($42 in my pocket)
Month 14 - 7TB, held back $56, earn $14, balance $56, paid $0+14 ($98 in my pocket)
Month 15 - 8TB, held back $64, earn $16, ba;ance $72, paid $8+14=22 ($120 in my pocket)
Now I run GE on the old node, I get $28 ($148 in my pocket)
Month 16 - 9TB, held back $72, earn $18, balance $82, paid $10 ($158 in my pocket)
Month 17 - 10TB, held back $80, earn $20, balance $92, paid $12 ($170 in my pocket)
In the long term it would even itself out, but I would start a new node and get the held amount on this one. The idea would be to keep the held amount lower and get the money sooner.
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No, we are at the end of the chain.
Because it is dirt cheap. You buy a server once, donât pay for electricity, donât pay for cooling, you pay absolutely nothing, while you save on bandwidth. You can download a movie once to your cache server (Netflix preloads off peak at lower rates) and share it to thousands.
1.2 is 20% parity overhead, right?
A RAIDZ2 on a 12 HDD wide array is 1.2.
I would have to do that calc.
Yeah exactly. Ditch S3, use native only, compress files together or use padding. Is it great? No. But it is not a deal breaker for a backup system either. My filesystem also only allows for 4k files, even if I create a 1kb textfile.
What we need is competitive pricing for our SUVs. If I canât offer competitive planes and have to sell them at a loss, why bother? Just in the hope that we will sell more SUVs if people know our name from the planes, which are a totally different business
It is the other way round. Some ISPs tried to get money out of them and I think in some places like the US, Netflix even paid the bribe.
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Lets make this even simpler.
You can skip this calculation if you are only interested in the summary
calc
Lets assume we have 10TB. Does not matter at what month we are at.
We have 10TB, make 20$ a month, have hold back 80$. This node has been running that way for a year, so we are currently at 80$ balance. If nothing changes, every month, this node will earn 20$.
Now you decide you add a 1TB HDD!
You need to decide if you let the node grow by giving it more space or if you get a new node online.
If you go with A: Your node grows to 11TB. Held back also grows 8$. This seems bad at first sight. You only earn 2$ than before, but you get paid 6$ less.
If you go with B: Your old node does not change and you get nothing from the new node.
B seems like the better deal, right? Because you get 6$ more, right? But it isnât.
Next month, we canât grow further. Either because there is not a lot of new data or we donât have more storage like in our example.
For A: The node has 11TB, make 22$ a month, have hold back 88$. We get paid 22$.
For B: The old node is still the same, so we get paid 20$. The new node is still under the 8$ threshold.
The 2$ more donât make up for the 6$ we earned less in the previous month.
But the same cycle repeats 3 times.
So in the end, both are exactly the same.
But I agree with you, it is pretty complicated to explain and it favours new nodes in the short term.
Normally you would combat that by requesting nodes to pay upfront for the held back amount.
That way for A: you make 6$ less, while for B: you would pay 8$ for the new node.
I agree that this SIA model is probably not realistic for STORJ. So you are right and time should also play a factor.
As an example, we could double the held back amount for the first 12 months.
That would be awesome! You get a happy 1y anniversary bonus (held back would be halved), and all the nodes that eventually get their first pay after one year survived the bathtub curve
Sure, which 1) Isnât high in that scenario. I could even be considered low redundancy by some. But more importantly, 2) while in a RAID array all data is spread over all disks, losing 20% in your example ensure the data is still fine, with Storj, segments are placed on a small subset of nodes randomly. Meaning if 10% goes offline, itâs theoretically possible that ALL of the pieces were stored on that 10%. With a 29/35 RS scheme, you only need to have at least 7 pieces stored on the failing 10% and there is about a 5.5% chance of that happening for each individual segment.
Number of subnets and segments might be a little outdated. Didnât feel like looking up the new numbers.
So yeah, Storj isnât like RAID in this sense. They need more redundancy.
No need, here ya go.
Thatâs 11 9âs. Just 16 subnets offline would do it.
4m is a LOT bigger though. But uplink could pack files together. And if you do that without encryption, you could still use the feature of Storj to request data from a file with an offset and length to grab only the file you need from that pack. This could be automated on larger batch uploads, but wouldnât help when files are uploaded one by one. I think there is something there that could be interesting though. Just needs some tweaking and massaging to turn into something useful that isnât too wasteful for customers.
I mean, reiterating a broken analogy isnât going to be helpful. Storj is clearly capable of providing S3 compatible services. Theyâre doing it. And I donât think either of us can know whether they run it at a loss. But the fact that they said they wonât lower prices again any time soon, makes me think that is unlikely. It sucks, but they need S3 for customer onboarding right now. So whatâs the downside of offering both with differentiated pricing?
I like how you and I are demoing the conversations the industry had before this became standard practice. 
Both sides sorely needed this solution, but for a long time they stared each other down, thinking the other side had to pay them for it. I think words like threaten, holding hostage and bribe were probably frequently uttered in those discussions. From both sides.
But why should they?
Just 16 subnets?
That seems like a friqqing huge number to me?
That seems like a huge number, even if Godzilla would show up in Europe and Putin would go out on a full-on nuke warfare.
You think it is broken. I donât.
No, they are not. Under what business model? I am sure BMW would be able to produce a plain if they subsidies the sh**t out of their car business into it. That does not mean that BMW is a competitive plane manufacturer. Just because native and S3 look similar on the surface, does not mean it is. A car and a plain can bring you from A to B. Does not mean that it is the same.
Nothing. Besides the subsidies and VC money running out. Take a look at the quarterly report.
There is not much runway left. Pretty soon they have to come up with a functioning business model.
STORJ acts pretty strange when it comes to the token report. Maybe this lead to some misunderstandings on my part, but here is how I read it.
Q3 2023 they spend 20 million tokens. Of that 20 million tokens, 14 million was spend on other.
According to STORJ, other is tokens they had to convert to FIAT to pay for stuff. For example S3 stuff. So while node operators, salaries, service providers that do accept tokens, boni make only up for 6 million, they spend 14 million on other.
You could also frame it as, that STORJ pays 10 times the amount to S3 services then to nodes! Or that 70% of total spending goes into S3. That can and will not work for long.
In my opinion, there is a pretty simple and easy way to solve the problem. Customers want Netflix. They pay their ISP so they can watch Netflix. In a perfect world, where we have net neutrality, ISP would be interested to offer customers a good Netflix experience, because, well that is what customers are paying them for.
That is what happened in Switzerland. Huge negative backlash in the media, people making fun of shitty Swisscom 1Gbit that is not even capable of streaming a FullHD Netflix movie and then Swisscom gave in. But that did only work because of two reasons.
- Media covered it right
- We have a free market that let people choose their ISP.
For large portions of the US, there is no free market when it comes to internet. That is why your ISPs could do some communist* monopoly shady deals and were able to blackmail Netflix.
*this is an exaggeration, I just love to trigger the Merica libertarian that think the live in some kind of free market utopia.
There are single node operators who run 16 /24 subnets. I donât think weâre talking about the same thing. I run nodes on 6 /24 subnets myself.
If youâre trying to convince me with the analogy, what I think is what matters. 
I mean, you responded to my comment, but I have no idea what you mean now. Storj is providing an S3 compatible service, is it not? So stop with the analogy and just point out what you mean without using an analogy, cause Iâm clearly not following. As for how different the services are. Under the hood, it is exactly the same. The only difference is a Storj hosted service inbetween that translates S3 to Storj native. So what makes you say that business model doesnât work?
Right, so am I correct in inferring that you mean they take a loss on edge services? I donât think we have the data to conclude that one way or the other. They will certainly not be paying list rating for GCP egress and I have no idea what their volume discounts look like. But since they clearly communicated that they wonât be lowering payouts more until market conditions change, I doubt they are currently taking a loss on unit economics, edge services included. If they are, there would be even more of a reason to differentiate prices and push customers to the profitable integration as soon as possible.
Iâm not going to argue about the âotherâ line of the token report. Itâs combining so much stuff that itâs entirely unclear how much of that would go to edge services. Iâm not even sure edge services are part of that line, let alone what proportion of that amount goes to edge services. Yet you seem to assume all of that is edge services. I doubt it.
You could argue whether itâs net neutral for ISPâs to host cache servers for some services and not for others. But from the point of view of ISPâs, their networks were overloaded by Netflix and Youtube and those platforms made all the profit from it. They tried to make those platforms pay for access to their customers at some point too. ISP customers pay ISPâs for internet⌠They pay Netflix for Netflix, but that business model dumped a lot of additional costs on ISPâs.
This was an industry debate happening world wide and it raged on for quite a while for a reason. Itâs not a simple thing to solve. And now you have me defending the ISPâs, playing devils advocate to show the other side. FYI, I donât believe what I just said above, but I can understand their thinking is all.
Iâm with you on that. I even remembered T-Mobile US at some point decided to just compress video streams on their mobile networks. ISPâs have gotten away with murder there by dividing up the market geographically like drug cartels would, to enforce monopoly rule.
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In the same location? On the same hardware?
Boy, these early subsidies really did produce unhealthy incentives.
Maybe I am not trying to convince you but other people in the forum
On a serious note, I am perfectly fine with you having a different opinion and I am not trying to convince you.
Again, under the hood, both a plane and a car will get you from A to B.
I am asking you, is it the same?
STORJ offers S3 endpoint. Peering and bandwidth are the bigger cost than HDDs. They offer an S3 endpoint with decentralised HDDs. However the HDDs were not a cost factor to begin with.
This is where we agree. I think it is pretty shady. My BS detector goes wild That is why I asked questions for clarification multiple times in the forums. My summary is based on the answers @Alexey offered me.
According to him:
- Everything is paid in STORJ tokens directly, except other
- Other is only converting tokens to FIAT
- FIAT is not used for Bahamas mansion nor Lambo
- FIAT is not used for salaries, bonuses
- FAIT is used for quote:
If you wanna read up on how they dodged the question like Keanu in Matrix, feel free to read this thread:
This would be an illusion and it wonât work.
(Padding is silly, I wonât comment on that, why waste space for no reason?)
What would be inside those combined compressed blobs? Same user data as today. After you found the chunk in the filesystem you need to unpack it and then search for user data.
Essentially you are cramming another, highly inefficient, filesystem into every chunk.
Because your ad-hoc filesystem cannot outperform host filesystem â end result will be worse performing node with extra steps.
All of that added complexity to design, that definitely makes retrieving files slower for all customers, only to speed up file-walker on misconfigured nodes to benefit (in what way? Filewalker does not need to be fast in the first place, random data access needs to be fast) few node operators who cannot be arsed to buy an SSD?
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Donât forget - âdo not buy anything, use what you haveâ. Not many people have unused SSDs lying around and file servers can work without them.
Thatâs what happens when you donât have competition between ISPs. Here one ISP I know asked Google for a cache server (and got it), because the traffic from Youtube was getting a bit high. Oh, and if Youtube (or Netflix or torrents) does not work good, customers just go to another ISP.
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Right. $10 gets you an enterprise SSD on eBay. Donât buy anything means donât build servers or buy extra storage. $10 is noise. The alternative is not to host the node because we are already approaching IOPS limit of drives. I canât imagine how people tolerate performance of raw array even in home setting. Itâs abysmal for anything, including streaming media with Plex.
Everyone shall go right now and buy an SSD for their array, even if they donât plan to host a node. It would be the the best $10 ever spent.
I see where you are coming from. But we could just say:
âSorry guys, STORJ is not made for small files, every file will occupy at least 4mbâ.
It would not bother me. Most files I have are either pictures (above 4mb), videos (way above 4mb) or SQL dumps (also above 4mb). Is it easy? No. Will we loose customers? Yes. But is would be way less stress for nodes and I guess also STORJ satellites.
You are talking about ZFS, while in reality a typical node would be a Windows host.
That is just bs. Even the crappiest RAIDZ array will easely bottleneck your 1GBit NIC for sequential reads. Let alone the 40mbit/s a Plex stream has.
Cache on the other hand is a total wast of money for most home users and for almost any workload does not work the way people think it does. L2ARC works for STORJ but is counterproductive to almost any other workload of a home user.
thats where you are wrong. it goes to the MFT (at least in ntfs) wich sometimes should be defragmented. (with the free program ultradefrag)
Easy, 36⏠program solution called primocache.
also who knows?
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