i have to agree with @shoofar here, and what does leader even suppose to mean in this case…
does that mean you @Alexey are the most active person on the forum, or that you are employed by storj by has a job related to the management of the forum, or is it an attempt to describe your editorial tasks on the forum, that you are the leader of storj…
i find the term quite confusing atleast when applied to a forum
that doesn’t make any sense tho, without the past you wouldn’t have any way to understand the future… so tho i do agree that one alexey and high older node information isn’t very useful for new nodes and with accounting for surge payouts and that alexey most likely works for storj, i does makes it seem very oroboros…
why is it a risk… is storj going to go bankrupt… no… is his computer going to blow up… no… not very likely… is his harddisk going to die… most likely not the first few years…
so lets see… what is required to run a storagenode… by the documentation 1 core pr node…
so lets call that 10 watts … thats what my decade old cpu uses… and a hdd uses max 10watts
then lets say the internet connection is existing in the first place as this is rarely the main concern for storj it seems… atleast for now
so 20watts and what can we get for that well from 500gb (minimum allowed) to what 18 or 20tb today… okay so what would our numbers be… well i got my own numbers to look at…
from the last 4 months
watts used… * hours in a month (using 24*30 =720)
720x20 = 14400watts used in a month… aka 14.4Kwh with a price about 1/3 of a euro pr kwh
so lets just call it an even 5€ for the month…
so thats the investment and now lets calculate the possible return…
or i’m going to grab my node’s numbers…
1st month. march - payout was 2.74$ and 8.22$ held back.
2nd month april - payout was 3,61$ and 10.83$ held back
3rd month may - payout was 5.50$ and 16.50$ held back…
so already in the 3rd month, we can pass the running costs if we built our system for low power consumption… granted at this point in time i had 6 or more tb, so continuing the rise required lots of free space…
so lets seee what is the cost of a 6tb drive… lets say 20$ pr tb and thus 120$
so really whats the risk… that the data goes bad… well thats just poor design considerations when building your node if you think that 1 hdd can be reliable…
and so lets say you fail after 2 months… i would assume your hdd is still good… the only investment was really the time of the hardware and the electricity costs… of which even on the 1st month 50% was paid back… so that leaves you with like a 4€ investment…
and why would it be luck… storj has a proven track record first time i got paid was over 3 years ago now… sure you can make storj into an investment, but by no means does it have to be… you choose to make it into that and really if it fails then its most likely your fault also…
designing stuff is hard, we are often unable to see things from enough perspectives to account for most common failures.
i put lots of money into my storage setup and tho i do consider it an investment, then it’s most certainly not much to do with luck… i know that it will make money… and then my next angle of attack will most likely be my electricity costs, so that i can supply that with solar… also then no matter what happens, i will have a nice solar setup that can supply me with power…
sure it’s an investment… but one i know will return profits over time if i make sure that i get stuff that will last that long and if it’s correctly installed…
another thing is that the smaller the storj hdd is, the less likely on is to make money of it…
if we say 12tb drive…
then in month 4 the numbers are 9.33$ paid out
and still the power consumption is still 5$
and you can get 18tb drives… so thats when it really starts to return profits…
ofc if you setup 18x1tb drives… that gives you a cost of 180watts + the core so 190watts
which equal 136.8kwh a month which is 45$ a month or so…
in electricity costs… so really its all down to if you can or have done the math before you start…
cant just count on luck… not if you want to succeed anyways…