Hey guys, haven’t posted anything in a while but found this topic to be interesting.
Why couldn’t the community of SNO’s just do something like this on their own if people are interested? But instead of using addresses and ID’s and all that, just use the old “honor system” (lol) and people can post screenshots of their dashboards. I mean… any large SNO’s are most likely going to have such things like Grafana, Zabbix or some other dashboard. To take it a step further, people could post pics of their setups with specs and all. I mean, who doesn’t love hardware porn too right?!?
As for the whale issue, I can see how this could be a bit of a concern at least while Storj is relatively small and might be frouned upon by some currently, but I believe it’s inevitable that if Storj continues to grow the wales will be essential. Let’s face it… with the constant exponential growing demand for data storage it’s simply not feasible for all of the data to be stored in peoples bedrooms.
According to some sources, global data is growing at a rate of ~1000 PB/day. That’s essentially 50,000 20TB nodes… per day… 18.25 million nodes per year! And that will only increase with time. Now obviously Storj will only make up a percentage of the market, but either way… whales will be essential. And that’s ok, because it will still be decentralized. So for those of you who believe whales are bad right now, here’s the solution… more whales!
As for Storj’s view on whales, I would speculate that they know it’s an inevitability and that the current subnet limitations (similar to the initial signup limitations) are just a best effort to keep it as decentralized as possible (and arguably probably more for geographical reasons) without actually hurting the whales that have the technical skills to work around the limitations. In reality this is actually a decent strategy (wheather on purpose or not) to somewhat limit the first whales to those with more technical skills and those more apt to run enterprise hardware with raid and backup systems like ups, gennys, etc… even if it is out of their garage. And if their investing that kind of money into their setup, well then there far more incentivised to keep their systems operational than your average normie making 6 bucks a month as a hobby.
Let’s face it… if Storj really wanted to prevent whales it’s not hard, even if someones using different email’s and token addresses for each node, but I highly doubt it’s worth the effort for them to do as it won’t really matter in the long run anyway except for turning larger SNO’s away. So whale away because once decentralized storage really takes off it’s going to get crazy, even for the smaller guys!
And lastly to the smaller SNO’s, although the subnet limitation will most likely remain as a means to distribute data geographically, that doesn’t mean they won’t ramp up data as more comes in… I mean, that’s kinda the point. And keep in mind that although there might be whales, it’s not the same as POW mining. Your hard drives will be more or less just as profitable 6 months or a year from now unlike how it works with mining. Here your providing a service not playing the lottery. So keep at it…
