Implications of the current Russia<->Ukraine crisis for Storj

This is not intended to be a discussion of the politics around the crisis.
But, what are the implications for Storj?
From storjnet.info Russia has a bit over 10% of the current population of Storj nodes.
What would happen (apart from huge repair traffic) if 10% of nodes would suddenly disappear?
(If Russia invokes their sovereign internet and decides to cut off at least for some period of time)
Has Storj done any modelling on this situation?

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I guess then there will be a lot of repair traffic and non-Russian SNOs to profit from higher payouts (?). Just some thoughts.

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If Russia ever blocks the internet, I believe Storj’s network should be able to retrieve data on the other nodes, given the space available.

Due to the relatively high repair threshold even if 10% of nodes suddenly disappear and we assume all segments are at the repair threshold. It would put at most 0.0000000426% of segments at risk. That’s 4 per 10 billion segments. But a more realistic, yet still pessimistic calculation of even spread amount segments between repair threshold and success threshold, it would be closer to 15 per trillion. Since there are somewhere in the hundreds of millions segments in total, this will almost certainly lead to no data loss on the entire network.
But please someone check my math on this.

So yeah, more repair traffic is the most we should notice should this happen.

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I would have thought the larger the pool of SNO’s to disappear in one go the greater the chance of it at least impacting someone.

Well that is still true, it’s just that this isn’t large enough to do damage yet as far as I can tell.

We have done this modeling! In fact, if you’ve seen an increase in repair traffic over the last week, it’s because we bumped our repair thresholds to what a couple different models suggested during this unstable time. Suffice it to say, we are extremely confident the data is safe in a number of modeled geopolitical scenarios. We’re considering writing a more generic blog post about dealing with all sorts of instability and how we handle it, because I assume this is not the only time someone has wondered about this.

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Good to hear. What was the repair threshold set to now?

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If a piece drops below 56 now, we’ll try and boost it back up to 80.

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Thank you for the feedback @jtolio

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Would it be cheaper, yet sufficient for Storj to instead of bumping the raw repair threshold, temporarily not count into the repair threshold nodes located in affected areas?

We could even call this process “antigeofencing” :wink:

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It’s an interesting idea, but it would require the ability to reliably know which nodes may be effected. IP Geolocation isn’t all that reliable and VPN/VPS setups for forwarding IPs could mess that up as well.

Additionally I don’t know if it would make that much of a difference for repair as on average you would still hit the repair threshold about the same amount more often.

The upside of not implementing redundancies for specific nodes is that it would protect you against any sudden loss of large amounts of nodes instead just those in specific countries.

Of course you could mark pieces as unhealthy and not send new or repair data to nodes in risky areas, but that unnecessarily punishes node operators for something that really isn’t their fault. And should really only be used as a last resort.

It doesn’t have to be 100% reliable.

Hello,
it seems that Russia might cut off the connection to the global internet by March 11.

Not sure about the source:

Seems more like steps towards the Chinese model that doesn’t cut off the internet, but gives the government a lot more control on filtering whatever they want. But headlines saying that aren’t nearly as catchy, heh.

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I really hope that it at least won’t be worse than now. I like this project and don’t want to leave.

An update: An update about durability and data traffic in Ukraine and Russia