Hello @WilliamA88,
Welcome to the forum!
Storj does not charge any fees for payouts. We calculate all payouts in USD, then send amount of tokens with a rate on the exact sent date.
If you think you earned $100 but only got $66 then it was almost definitely held back by storj.
Also, $100 (or $66) in a month is kind of a lot. Iāve been doing this for a couple of years and I generally only get around $30.
The only āfeeā to pay it into your wallet the first time paid by storj. Once itās in your wallet moving it around will of course cost more in gas fees, thatās just crypto doing crypto things.
You can see hold back information on your web dashboard. go to the bottom and click on payout history. Holdback is really miserable for the first 18 months.
Also, I have a 30 month old node that has 10 bucks held back that will be held forever or at least I do a graceful exit.
Which is completely broken. $10 isnāt anything, let alone good enough incentive to do graceful exit. It shall be made more painful for the operators not to. Way more painful.
Look at this way: if I decide I need my space back - Iām not planning for a month in advance for $10. I donāt want to do extra work for $10.
In fact, I would be more inclined to do graceful exit if there was no threat of $10 ā then it would be social contract, not commercial, and thus more powerful. Compare:
ā Hey, please do graceful exit - it helps the network
ā of course I will, Iām not a jerk!
Vs:
ā hey do graceful exit or I will not give you your money you already earned and Iāve been hoarding all those years!
ā WTF lol :).
Also, if this $10 I earned and storj is holding it ā I shall be paid interest. Why shall I get storj free loan?
If this money I did not earn ā then this even further solidifies my point ā I will be even less likely to bother with graceful exit. People are more averse to loss than to unearned income.
I would not be against having to give storj credit card to charge in case my node dies abruptly. And the more data node stores ā the higher the charge. $100-500 shall do it. Then I will probably consider doing graceful exit when I need to get the space back.
One command call? Why not? Then it will work for you, just wait 30 days as nothing happen, the node will still earn for these days for the stored data and for egress, so usual monthly payout + held back (not only $10).
Making a call is not a problem. Waiting a month is. If I need space now ā node is rm -rf-ed. Why would I wait a month for $10, that was my point.
So in case you disk abruply dies you would not only have to pay for a replacement disk but also pay $500 to Storj? This does not sound appealing and I donāt know if that would work. Disks happen to die whenever they want. So I donāt think I would give Storj my credit card to charge me $500 in such a case.
2 Likes
Storj is supposed to be using underutilized resources, right?. Hence, Storj does not run on isolated disks. It runs on the same array all the rest of the data is. Which would be redundant. Uptime is pretty high.
And yes, itās a risk. And an incentive not to run nodes on potatoes, as well as committing long term.
Furthermore, think about it just like an insurance. So letās say fine is $500 for losing node: ā if the probability of loss 0.02% (which is average raid5 with 2% annual disk failure rate) this becomes $0.10. Itās nothing. Node pays way more than $.10.
I think this conclusion is wrong. People are supposed to use what they have. This could be a single disk that you already have and repurpose it for Storj. Also not everyone is running arrays.
2 Likes
Ok, then risk assessment will be different but still reasonable: 2% failure rate at $500 fine is $10. Node pays more than that.
And network probably will run better if nodes are on arrays, not isolated disks ā both from network performance/responsiveness perspectives as well as lower turnover rate: no disk failures means less repair traffic. There is excess of node operators. It wonāt hurt to improve average node residency by shedding shoddy nodes.
Ultimately, holding part of the payout is effectively the same thing, just worse: because even well-behaving nodes are punished.
The thought process is as follows:
- now held amount is too small and is a poor incentive
- Itās also a free loan to storj ā bad.
- staking some amount of money as a collateral and paying interest on it is better ā but this can be a barrier for entry. Also storj does not want to carry this liability on its books and itās not an investment bank.
- the opposite ā free to join, but punitive fines in case of breach of contract ā amazing in all respects. And yields effectively the same āheld amountā ā around $10, but due to higher loss aversion humans exhibit will be more effective at shaping the desired behavior.
The more I think about it ā the more Iām convinced that itās an amazing plan. Please consider it 
you know, Iāve been farting around with sia storage hosting, and you need to put in collateral to host, and it can get excessive. Like, 1.5TB of actual storage has consumed $50 but it would only earn $9 over the next six months. The rest of the collateral is taken up by the size of the data the client might use even if they arenāt actually using it.
But anyways, point isā¦ I think putting up collateral would be a barrier to entry.
1 Like
Withholding canāt be more than a gentle nudge towards using graceful-exit. It has to be cheap, because you want the source of the storage to be as cheap as possible: with all reliability coming from clever Satellite software. If the withholding/stake/deposit was painful to loseā¦ nobody would be offering space from cheap/consumer/unreliable setups. Theyād only offer more reliable and expensive space: at a rate Storj couldnāt afford to resell at $4/TB/m (and theyāre barely profitable-on-paper with the payout rates today). Storjās special-sauce has always been durable software, not durable hardware.
Asking for any type of fiat deposit (or token buy/stake) up-front would be a mistake. Increasing the pain of lost withholding would be a mistake. They probably could eliminate withholding with 28k+ nodes nowā¦ but I think itās important that ājust leavingā has a non-zero cost.
1 Like
Isnāt this a point?
Storj select begs to differ though. They are allegedly paid less, in exchange for some utilization guarantee.
Iām offering space from a redudnand array. Why woudl I spin a disk just for storj? Storj is supposed to use already online capacity. Bringing single disks that are sitting on the shelf for storj is not what it was intended to do.
There are massive number of NAS units sold worldwide ā and people who buy NAS are the same people who at some point poinder ā what I"m supposed to do with all that extra space?!..
It would be interesting to collect hardware stats, or at least system stats --e.g. amount of memory on the system and type of a filesystem wherever possible to see the distribution of hardware.
Iām fully onboard with the idea. But Iām looking at my nodes, and repair traffic is 50-100% of useful egress. Itās stupid. Node turnover is too high. At the same time, there is too much available space. So the problem to solve is to reduce turnover.
I agree, upfront collateral is bad for more than this reason, as I expressed here:
Also agree. There shall be no withholding. Withholding is preemptive punishment. āI know you wonāt leave gracefully you disgusting worthless nobody so Iāll keep some of the money you have earned until you prove otherwiseā. What kind of way is it to treat your suppliers?!
It has to have high cost. Not just non-zero. It must be punitive. Right now it has non-zero cost. As I said above, who in their right mind would alter their behavior for $10? Nobody.
But if you have $500 fine for slamming the door ā itās still effective $10 if your risk of losing data is 2% (which is only the case if you use single disks, which is a wrong way to do it ā see above, actual cost of those $500 is therefore 10 cents) ā that would be a good deterrent. You would attract people who can plan ahead, and there for the long run.
Yes, network can work on shitty hardware ā but this comes with high turnover, associated waste of resources, and storj has to pay for repair.