With the recent discussion on payout changes and some operators considering leaving, would this be a good time to start new nodes and hopefully get data more quickly than usual?
Or would the reduction in test data balance things out?
I’ve recently wrapped up a project that had a few servers with 20TB to 50TB each and have cheap electricity for a couple years (0.04USD/kWh), so I was already considering Storj. I have a couple of lightweight tasks that run on them so they’re doing to be powered anyway, my incremental costs are the electricity to leave drives running (and not even that in the winter).
I think I’m in a genuine “use spare capacity” situation, but what has held me back in the past is the slow ramp up to where the payouts are worth the hassle vs the remaining lifespan of the hardware.
Even with the lower numbers overall, getting nodes to where they’re actually utilized could be worthwhile.
It’s really hard to predict the impact of these changes especially since we don’t know yet how they are going to be implemented as it is just a proposal for now. The earnings estimator isn’t magic. It’s based on past behavior, so it won’t represent the new situation. But given the low energy cost you mentioned and already having the hardware, I would start them. Just start with as low energy consuming setup per IP (if you have access to multiple IPs) so basically just a single server with a single disk. Earnings are still high now, so you can get some good earnings. But with that kind of energy costs, you’d probably still be profitable with the new payouts, especially since you’ll still have the transition period during which you’ll earn quite well.
Let’s make some guesses!
If the ten largest SNOs leave the network and their previous share of the payment they received matches their share of stored data and number of nodes (i.e. 17.4% approximately!), then each of the remaining nodes , which are not already full, would receive 472.5GB. These are data to be taken very lightly, there are a lot of assumptions and approximations in there.