Important Update: Upcoming Storj Customer Pricing Adjustments and SNO Impact

[arrogantrabbit]

@EBI

It generates continuous uploads, downloads, disk reads and writes, network traffic, CPU activity and heat. That workload increases power consumption, keeps cooling fans running, adds wear to hard drives and other components, and places a real load on the operator’s internet connection and router.

Pleas measure additional workload. I measured. It’s couple of watts over 24 hour period on average. Network traffic is negligible. As I said above, those who run nodes, have it unmetered.

Wear to hard drive? Hard drive wears by spinning. Exta head movement don’t change the outcome.

Load on a router? Come on. You are splitting hairs. Yes, dropping a needle in the Atlantic Ocean technically raises the level. Not useful.

@EBI

Operators regularly check whether it is online, investigate downtime, monitor disk health and available space, install updates, deal with Docker or operating-system problems, replace failed drives, troubleshoot network interruptions and make sure the node remains reachable and reliable. When something goes wrong, Storj does not send a technician to our homes—the operator provides the time, knowledge and labour.

I do none of that. Replace drive is irrespective of storj. Drives fail. You replace them. My nodes are on the same array as the other data. That array is scrubbed monthly. Bad disks are replaced. Storj has nothing to do with that.

Internet outages are also affecting my other services. I bring server back online anyway. With or without storj.

Storj installs updates. Not you. You just run their updater service. as part of setup.
Netwrok interruption you would troubleshoot anyway without storj. Storj does not change that.

Remember, you are not looking at what storj benefits from that you do anyway. You look at what extra work do you have to do because now you run node. That work is zero.

@EBI

Even “unused” resources are not free resources. Disk capacity has value. Bandwidth has value. Electricity, cooling, hardware lifespan, physical space, maintenance and the operator’s time all have value. The fact that equipment was already owned does not suddenly make its use, depreciation and opportunity cost equal to zero.

Yes. And without storj that capacity is wasted. Value of bandwidth is zero.
Extra electricity and cooling of 2 extra watts are incnsequential. Operator time is not spent on something that would not be otherswise spent anyway. That’s my point.

@EBI

The fact that equipment was already owned does not suddenly make its use, depreciation and opportunity cost equal to zero.

You wold have have those costs without storj. Storj does not change depreciation or opportunity cost. Storj is that opportunity. Because the alternative – capacity sits unused.

@EBI

By that logic, a taxi company should barely pay a driver because the driver already owned the car, already had insurance and was going to keep the car parked somewhere anyway. That is obviously not how a fair business relationship works.

You just reinvented uber and Lyft.

And no, it’s not the same thing. When you drive the car extra miles – you put wear on your car and burn 100% of gas you would not burn otherwise. Hard drive that already spins does nto wear faster whether you send IO to it or not. It’ designed to write 24/7 anyway. That’s what it does. You dont’ spend 100% of electricity on storj. You spend half a percent.

@EBI

Storj receives a reliable infrastructure service from thousands of independent operators without having to purchase, host and maintain all that hardware itself. Presenting this relationship as though Storj is simply doing operators a favour by filling their “free space” ignores where a large part of the network’s economic value actually comes from.

Nobody presents it like that. It’s not a zero sum game. Storj benefits because they get almost free, way below market resources (it has to be low market to work. Otherwise they can rent VPS, they dont’ need operators. The whole premise of the project is carbon footprint reduction and waste elimination). Operators benefit because their capacity that will be wasted is now paid for.

@EBI

Node operators are not asking to be paid for imaginary costs. They are asking people to stop pretending that bandwidth, electricity, cooling, hardware wear, maintenance, availability and human time are free.

It’s not pretending. It’s facts. You can’t expect storj to pay for the whole server depreciation just because you downloaded and ran a binary.

Calculate accurately what does it actually cost you to runs storj vs not run storj. You will see it’s only extra few watts of power. Measure it, don’t take my word for it.

There is no extra human time spent for storj that would not be otherwise spent: you still have to maintain the server, still keep it online, still swap disks and install OS updates. The fact that there are 34 processes running instead of 32 makes absolutely no difference in the amount of work you do.

[EBI]

So the conclusion is: install it once, go on vacation, electricity is negligible, hard drive wear is negligible, fan and hardware wear are negligible, maintenance time is negligible… Yet somehow, when you add all those ‘negligible’ things together, they’re no longer negligible.

[arrogantrabbit]

@EBI

somehow

Explain how then. You claim they are non-insignificant. I showed you why they are negligible. I don’t what else to say.

But solution is simple: if someone thinks they don’t want free money — they are free to rm -rf nodes. There is nothing to discuss really.

[Alexey]

You definitely built servers specifically for Storj, right? Even though we strongly discouraged this approach? If so, that’s your decision, not Storj’s. We warned you that it might never yield a return on investment.
Storj’s core idea remains the same: we leverage what already exists and discourage Operators to build new servers, but rather to run nodes on existing ones, which will remain online regardless of whether they’re running Storj or not. This isn’t mining; it’s providing resources that aren’t being used, but once cost you money, which you’ve already paid anyway. Storj simply discounts your bills, which you inevitably pay with or without Storj.
As long as the number of nodes grows and there’s enough space, the price of services is unlikely to increase—it’s economics. And @arrogantrabbit is right: we should lower prices in line with economics. However, we’re deliberately not doing so because we value our Operators and the quality of the service they provide, even if there are a few miners who will inevitably leave the project later.

[dyhchang]

I’m one of the people that just has some extra drive space that I could use to recoup electricity costs. Measured my server+router+switch power use with the Storj container on to be ~98W, and with Storj off to be ~95W. With 3W, I put up 13TB of which 11TB is used and the rest is reclaimable or free. Last month I got ~$20 in Storj token, which I used to pay for my backups in Storj. Imo, a great deal as a node operator for 3.5 years.

[batezippi]

To take reddit drama seriously is rather foolish

[batezippi]

that is not how supply and demand works. If it makes no financial sense for you to run it, just shut it down.. or wait for a payout increase I guess

[batezippi]

Thats it time to setup a Union!

[Ruskiem]

My take on increase/decrease payments for Nodes:

@alpharabbit

Why should storj increase payment when there is more than enough space available at current price? I guess they could even decrease payment…

i mean sure, it could be decreased in such condition if You look only at that space available = more node operators than its necessary.

BUT there are 2 types of node operators,

1. the ones really distributed on map (private, small, home, small business)
2. the ones clustered in data centers that only look like decentralized

So my take is decreasing payments will discourage the more valuable for decentralization and therefore reliability of the network 1) nodes.
While 2) don’t care as they take whatever is given, because they already run an overlapping business. (who creates Storj nodes there? employees or related with or without the company knowledge)

So yea its actually like bad bacteria situation, You can never get rid of the 2) out of the 1) space. 2) should be in Storj Select branch.

If You decrease payment, “real nodes” will melt, clustered VPS’s will stay (only some will drop out) overall population may not decrease, but more bad bacterias for sure. If You Increase payment, more good and bad bacterias - proportions? unsure, but if decrease payment, im sure good ones will give up more, because overall, too much effort to reward ratio. (the give up can happen by any nearest trigger, like if something breaks, so its not like SNO complain but stay - so payment conditions are okay for them, its up to some point of break, @arrogantrabbit theres just not enough people like You on a global scale to support the network, it maybe would be possible only with data centers, but again, there goes a decentralization then…) And in some regions Storj need more nodes of any kind actually, so a decrease will hurt even more those regions. ¯_(ツ)_/¯. So yes do nothing, because if rise You have to have money for that, and customers don’t just want to pay more, they want to pay less, sooo if only we could let them pay less, and get SNOs earn more! …Wait! i have an idea…

But first some answers i would give:

@alpharabbit

Didn’t I do that? There is a significant oversupply of provided space. In a free market this leads to lower prices.

• Yes, lower prices, and more lower quality nodes for that lower prices. I guess Storj was supposed to be a network of decentralized nodes, not a layer for clustered nodes in data centers.

@Alexey

Storj’s core idea remains the same: we leverage what already exists and discourage Operators to build new servers, but rather to run nodes on existing ones, which will remain online regardless of whether they’re running Storj or not. This isn’t mining; it’s providing resources that aren’t being used, but once cost you money, which you’ve already paid anyway. Storj simply discounts your bills, which you inevitably pay with or without Storj.

• Yes, i needed a Workstation that runs 24/7/365 anyway, but i didn’t have the HDDs Storj needs, so i bought them used for part my needs, part storj to cover the whole unit costs - a sort of symbiosis. The problem i have with storj is that the disks was never able to fill more than ~half available space. So im unable to use the full potential. So im open to anything that fill the gap (either compensate that by rise of payouts or something that will fix that, maybe some new plan to opt-in, like free egress, so my node can get filled actually so i can be more happy with storj, sort of rising values for everyone, i could potentially rise my internet option to the max 8/8Gbps and still be in some profit, and customers could have free downloads up to idk like x10 of what they store or whatever the economics say, so storj can offer the best options on the market)

if Storj aims for goals like @Dominick said, it should be cleaner message on what estimated payouts nodes with fast internet can count when joining the network.

Probably many potential nodes out there with some highend fiber in house, don’t want to do all the setup effort for unknown, but they would, if they had some more encourage what it can give them and actual call to action, that they are appreciated! Actually i would also consider some experiments, like no pay for egress, theres some SNOs with fibre with like 8Gbps upload in home that is common in europe now, that dont care to emit some payless egress, if it only brings payouts for the storage, (and up to some total limits for sure related to how much was stored, since home ISP may restrict reselling the internet service itself, it can shut theirs mounts if the node wont take a penny for the transfer (egress))

Also if there would be a honest plan “pay only for storage”, and not for egress,
that would address the most customers pain point i guess. But that would only need to be on great internet nodes. i would totally like to get my 16TB disk finally filled, which i haven’t been able to achieve for 3-4 years, its always half full, in exchange of free egress, because egress is so expensive that no one wants to use it anyway ;(
(my node’s payouts are almost only from storage)
im not event talking about rising any storage cost!
it can stay the same,
Who knows, maybe that variant could potentially become extremely popular.

♫
Just fill it
Fill it
Fill it
Fill it
Fill it

[[Guitar Solo]]

[Chorus]
[Fill it (Fill it), fill it (Fill it)
No one wants to be defeated
Showin’ how funky and strong is your node
It doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right (Who’s wrong, who’s right)
Just fill it (Fill it; Hoo-hoo), fill it (Fill it)]
♫

oh, Sorry, thats some unexpected Michal Jackson sno song i guess.