How to Survive - without reducing SNO compensation

@Roxor A few points:

First, the $0.15/TB cut was only the first step, and it affected storage compensation, not egress.

Second, I think you are seriously underestimating the network risk. After removing safeguards like the 24-hour rule, the amount of coordinated or malicious capacity needed to create a serious availability and repair problem becomes much smaller. Even with the old safeguards, a very small number of sufficiently large SNOs acting together could already create a situation where repair capacity becomes a real concern.

And I don’t think Storj — or you, Roxor — realize how close we have already come to exactly that kind of coordinated exit. This is not some theoretical “maybe one day” risk to me.

And third, I don’t agree that these cuts meaningfully improve Storj’s chances of surviving:

Yes, the cuts save money. But compared with the scale of the actual financial problem, those savings are tiny while the potential network-side downside is very real.

@hashbackup
First of all, I wouldn’t call them “friends.” They’re simply other SNOs who invested heavily and are now affected by the same decisions.

Second, I’m not just running a bunch of VPNs to game node selection. I built substantial infrastructure across customer servers and numerous independent hosts. And yes, if compensation is cut, some of those hosts will obviously be consolidated because costs have to come down. That doesn’t mean throwing the nodes away — the node count can remain while the underlying infrastructure is reduced.

And I’m not judging smaller SNOs for using VPNs either. Plenty do, and Storj itself hasn’t exactly been flawless in following its own commitments either — delayed payouts being an obvious example.

Most importantly, there are at least three operators running several petabytes each in a fully ToS-compliant way. Together, they account for roughly 15-20% of all subnets. Without any cheating.

Saying the guy who created the biggest cluster risk under old placement rules. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

Say what you like, since there’s no way to verify it. The only way I’d believe it is if you and your associates actually announce a shutdown timeframe, even if it’s 5 minutes, and demonstrate that you can break the network. If you did that, it would be a powerful demonstration and you’d have much more leverage with Storj to rescind the cuts, without having to fool with making AI software enhancements. Since you haven’t actually proven you can break the network, my assumption is you can’t.

@elek but this you should fix anyway


link is 404: https://www.storj.io/pricing/change-FAQs (customer access storj.io)

No, that’s exactly what I’m stating. Literally: Operators who professionalized and expanded ignored Storj’s messaging exemplified by Alexey’s posts.

They have acted on hypotheticals stated by Storj, sure. But these were not recommendations. And Storj have found a different way to supply potentially missing capacity through surge nodes anyway, so they’d be fine without these operators.

BTW, I am one of those operators who bought hardware specifically for Storj. Not much, just a couple of hard drives. But I’m not crying that now this investment is lost—I’ve evaluated the risks of the stated hypotheticals and limited exposure accordingly. As such, all hardware is paid off at least twice at this point.

Thanks the report. It worked only with lower case (faq) letters. Changed it back to upper case.

5.1.12 through 5.1.16 are duplicates of 5.1.7 through 5.1.11 if that helps :zany_face:

Yes, I shared this with the team. We updated prices, but didn’t clean duplications.

@littleskunk did you check the new numbers? Have you forwarded my plan?

No. Your plan has already consumed hundreds of posts of people checking assumptions you invented. There is nothing to forward.

It starts with your conclusion:

The current SNO payout schedule is the floor. There must be no reduction.

Everything after that is an attempt to make that conclusion work. Raise customer prices by 70%. Assume tolerable churn without customer data. Find another $4-5M of capital. Build a control plane, provisioning APIs, OAuth, migration tooling, SDKs, filesystem integration, caching, WordPress, Plex/Jellyfin/Emby, NAS packages, an integration marketplace and an AI data plane. Much of it on a 90-day schedule.

And then we eventually get to the actual commercial terms:

STORJ Connect would be my gift to STORJ, provided that you reverse the payment cuts.

You later described this explicitly as a “fair exchange”, and then explained why:

Yes, my investment in Storj is well into six figures, so 18% absolutely matters to me.

There we go.

You made a large investment under earlier Storj economics. Those economics changed. Now you want Storj to preserve your payout and your deployment model, and you are offering software in exchange.

Elek already gave you the useful answer. Build one or two things customers actually want to pay for and demonstrate that they generate revenue.

If Storj wants your software after that, great. They don’t owe you protection from supplier-price changes in exchange for it.

Quit wasting people’s time, especially actual Storj staff. They have better things to do than repeatedly debunk and evaluate your self-serving proposals.

About STORJ Connect I started a poll. Introducing STORJ Connect - #72 by GfTmbH

I continue checking the numbers from time to time. I do see more full nodes but the progress is slow. Lets say we are not there yet.

There is still no significant reduction in node count. In my opinion at least half of the existing nodes should leave for right sizing. Preferably it should be the biggest whales.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many SNOs are thinking “well… the company may die anyways… I may as well stay and see what happens… plus there’s not really any other project to jump to”. Everybody hopes somebody else will leave :slight_smile:

people not got yet smaller payouts to calculate. will take 2-3 months.

No other project but used HDD prices at insane levels. I could sell my drives after years of use with a profit. Never seen a situation like that.