Yes, I read the Chapter 11 documents.
The economics here are worth putting into perspective.
Storj lists among its unsecured claims:
- Inveniam Capital Partners: $4,037,963.40
- U.S. Treasury / IRS: $3,741,537.00
- Georgia Department of Revenue: $121,642.00
- “SNO liability”: $296,316.79
The filing therefore shows liabilities of several million dollars elsewhere, while the listed SNO liability is only a few hundred thousand dollars.
This is why I think we are asking the wrong question.
Even if every single node operator agreed to work for free, how much cash would that actually save Storj per year?
If SNO payouts are already a very small fraction of Storj’s revenue and overall costs, reducing them further does not solve a multimillion-dollar financial problem. It simply shifts more of the burden onto the people providing the storage infrastructure.
Before discussing voluntary reductions — and especially before using this experiment to model permanent payout reductions — Storj should publish one very simple number:
Total annual SNO payouts as a percentage of total customer revenue.
Then we can calculate what a 25%, 50% or even 100% reduction would actually accomplish.
Otherwise, asking node operators to work for free risks being little more than throwing money down the drain while ignoring the much larger numbers on the balance sheet.