Hi @jocelyn, thx for your reply and the good spirit.
I’ll probably e-mail the team as you suggested, to have their opinion ^^
Maybe we could open a topic dedicated to this matter here on the forum, something like “Incentives and payments for making SNOs stay”? What do you think?
I love it! Will make that topic now, with your post as the genesis block 
We want to hear from you! This is a thread to hear form the community about what incentives and payments resonate with SNOs. We love our storage node operators, especially the ones who stay for a long time.
What makes you want to keep on the Storj journey?
What ideas do you have, and what are we already doing right (so we can do more of that?)
What are some compelling incentives? (Be creative!) Are there things in addition to payments that also make you want to stay on the network??
Please let us know on this thread!
This is long winded, so I apologize in advance.
For me personally, I believe that decentralized compute and storage will play a major role as users and organizations push for more control over their data, that’s why I am wanting to keep providing infrastructure for Storj and other decentralized storage platforms.
As a provider of ~150TB of space available across Canada for Storj and other distributed storage platforms, transparency into the network as a whole is immensely important. I keep seeing threads and posts that the Storj network requires more capacity for production and even for bringing on the people on the waitlist, but I am sitting here with a few TB of storage used and wondering where the shortage of provider storage is. If you can provide live network information and sanitized node information (without IPs and storage IDs) such as number of providers providing 0-5TB, 5-10TB, etc. and their utilizations, that would help providers see where the improvements can be made, whether it is on capacity per node, node count, general geographic location, or any conclusion that providers can pull from the data. Provide the data and us providers will try to help fill in the gaps, it is in our best interests as much as yours.
I understand that there are a lot of providers with small amounts of capacity, but until the platform is paying out enough for people’s time and energy keeping their systems running, Storj will not attract providers. Surge payouts are really only good if people are storing data, so new providers will have to wait a while before seeing any benefit of surge payouts, and even then, they are only looking at a few dollars a month at most for a while. That really is not super motivating for someone to ensure that they have a UPS to deal with power outages or multiple internet connections in case one goes down long enough to take a reputation hit.
The l33t bonus payed out was a very nice gesture, and appreciated, on Storj Labs part. For me personally, while I will keep providing storage on the network, a constant reduced payout of “reserved” capacity would probably go a long way. In order to prevent users from spoofing the network like people were doing with v2 and heavy over-subscription of storage nodes, allow users to opt into artificial filling of the capacity in exchange for a reduced payout for artificially filled capacity, or “reserved” space not currently being used by production data. Storj would then fill the advertised capacity with empty/random data that is not used for anything but would validate the capacity the SNO is providing. The satellite then pays the user a heavily reduced amount, say $0.2/TB purely as an example, for this reserved capacity, swapping the reserve data out with customer data as it comes in.
This helps to solve a couple of problems. First, the user has a hard time spoofing the network by spinning up a bunch of VMs on the same storage and over-subscribing and Storj has as close to guaranteed capacity as possible. Second, users who opt into this get a relatively steady, albeit reduced, income from storage they are dedicating to the network. This helps to ease costs for the provider and shows that they can actually earn income from this capacity. Enough to make it worth their while but at the same time data that is not putting constant wear on their hardware unlike customer data being read from and audited more diligently. This would help to retain providers as well as incentivize current providers to expand their available capacity. As it stands, there is no incentive for the full providers to expand as the new capacity will not get used unless the rest of the network expands as well, which is what we are seeing now. There is also no incentive for larger providers to join because they will be using more in power than they are earning, never mind any other expenses.
Essentially where things are at right now are you are only attracting people who believe in your long term vision and goals, but those people are very limited, especially in the world of crypto volatility and the education about functional crypto based platforms like Storj. Stability is the name of the game, both for Storj Labs and for potential providers. It is tough to convince even technical people to have an Ethereum wallet and ensure it is being backed up in case of data loss, create accounts with crypto exchanges usually to convert to another mainstream crypto with low TX fees like Litecoin, then transfer to another exchange for conversion into fiat (at least this is the general required process in Canada from what I have found), all for a potential couple of dollars a month. That is going to be your bottleneck for attracting users in the first place. Retaining users is going to require a steady and reliable source of revenue. If an SNO loses an HDD or computer that was storing a couple of TB of data, it better be worth it for them to get everything going again with the replacement hardware and having to start from scratch again or they are not coming back to the network unless they believe in what you are doing and are in it for the long haul.
Anyway, that is my $0.02 on this. Again, long winded, but I have been wanting to express these suggestions since I got involved in v2 in mid 2017 but never really had a good communication platform with you guys until now. I love the townhalls for constant updates for development status and organization updates. As well, the activity that Storj staff have on the forums and previously Rocket Chat is excellent. And finally, the fact that you guys created a thread like this to gather feedback from SNOs instead of living in a bubble without input says a lot in and of itself, so thank you for doing that. The transparency in the past few years from Storj has been a major reason for continuing to follow this platform through development and provide storage on it.
Hi @Cmdrd
Firstly: Never apologize when youre being awesome!
That said, I agree that decentralization is answering not only a (large) current unmet need, but also future needs of people who arent even tuned in yet - but will need it soon.
Transparency is really key, and we do try to release as much info as we can, in the most timely manner. One of the reasons my role exists is to help that happen.
Because pretty much everything we do affects the community to some extent, it means that a lot of the conversations we have are cross disciplinary. for example, engineering is an obvious group. But also UX, and accounting, and logistics, and operations. Then we have devops, and marketing. Each of these groups may look unrelated, but they’re all doing things which the community needs to know about at some point. I do think that we have got a little bit faster & more efficient over the years with this. But at meanwhile the company continues to grow. We’re committed to keeping as nimble and transparent as we reasonably can however.
I think you have a great point about providers being helpful to us in filling gaps and that it’s in everyone’s best interests!
I also take your point about different types of providers. I think theres room for everyone in Storj/Tardigrade, but that not everyone will use it the same way. Some people are interested in the dream of decentralized future. And then there will be many people who are justand looking to build a business. So from idealist to pragmatist, people may want different things. The reason Tardigrade exists with SLAs is to acknowledge that.
Im happy you enjoyed the 1337 bonus. The idea of a reserved-capacity payout is interesting. Im wondering which user-profile you think that would map to. Do you think there are a lot of folks who would take advantage of such a thing? And do you think they would be clustered in certain regions, meaning maybe some geolacations would be better suited? Or do you think it would appeal to widespread regions?
Finally, I do agree with you that there are lots of very technical people who dont know much about Ethereum. We do pay for the gas to send payouts, so we’re quite familiar with conversion shenanigans! if there are people who are otherwise equipped to be great SNOs I would hate to think were losing them for that reason.We dont give advice on tokens, though.
Im so happy that you have stuck with us since 2017, and am glad that you like this new platform. Thank you and please keep coming around !!!
I do not think there is a point for the SNO to overbook storage. In v2, setting the capacity as 8TB even if the drive is 1TB meant that I could fill that 1TB faster (because the node would accept larger shards).
I have asked the devs a couple of times about this and the answer I got that in v3 the node is chosen for storing the piece without taking into account how much free space it has (as long as it has enough). I hope that hasn’t changed.
Running multiple nodes on the same /24 should not increase the total amount of data I get (well, unless someone else in the same /24 is also running a node, then it would be better for me to run more nodes).
If someone has multiple internet connections, then he can run multiple nodes and get more data, but overbooking storage does not really help.
No idea, this could be something that is put out to survey or something along those lines to gauge feedback and SNO response. Could also be an experimental flag rolled out to SNOs who can enable it without impact for a few months to gather the adoption rate data that would be beneficial for doing something like this without actually developing and deploying the full implementation. Just spitballing some ideas that would add as little financial overhead for satellite operators as possible while hopefully retaining SNOs while the customer base grows and helping to maintain a healthy SNO pool.
It probably would not end up being as much of an issue with v3 as you are right, there is less incentive for a provider to advertise capacity that they do not have as IP filtering and such would help to tackle that. Probably ultimately less useful for satellite operators to guarantee capacity unless someone is using the storage for other stuff as well and advertising more available capacity than they actually have, but the SNO software would probably be able to just detect and track that anyway without something like this in place.
1 - I love the idea of Storj and have been with you for years, but I’m interested in making this pay as a profitable business for me. I’ve got 100TB+ available to Storj on a leased line and running a node needs to be profitable. I’m not going to keep buying/investing in more nodes if it doesn’t make financial sense.
2 - some kind of ranking system. When I was using worldcommunitygrid to donate computing power, it was the idea of winning and climbing the leader board that kept me interested and motivated (and made me install the software of other available machines) - where’s Shawn’s map of nodes project? Maybe you can show payment stats like you have done in previous months? At least then I could see if I was in the top10 payouts like before.
What I would like to see is exceptions to the “5 hours down and you’re out” rule. Considering that running a Storj node is aimed at home users, this is a bit too strict, especially considering that, unlike a datacenter, people do not normally have multiple internet connections and generators and people are usually not at home most of the time (and sometimes go on vacation far away from home) with no way to quickly get back. In addition, ISPs usually are not in a hurry to fix a problem for a home user (may need to wait until the next work day).
I have two internet connections, redundant routers and a big UPS (no generator, but probably could rent one fast enough or figure something out), but even I sometimes go on a vacation or may not be able to quickly get home if there is some problem.
yer, what he said! 
Showing on the dashboard how much you made and how much is in escrow.
Developing the clean exit system.
Retributing the SNO’s on a weekly or daily basis.
Not letting hanging SNO’s with a full HDD and no egress trafic.
Be really transparent by supporting third party sites like http://storjnet.info/ rather than shutting them down.
Listening to your users about your business model.
Just a few suggestions, which are likely to be ignored as they are not in the white paper.
I fully support your suggestion.
But I would like to propose the following.
In such conditions, the operator will guarantee the amount of space, it is guaranteed to have certain money every month, which will allow planning the installation of equipment in the Data Center or other reservation costs.
Same thing about tokens i writen in other discuttion
I’m just small potatoes here (1 node, 2TB of disk, but unlimited bandwidth) and I’ve been running my node for 4 months now. Since the last payout I have earned just under $3 in tokens. So I’m on the fence about doing more. I think it’s a great idea but I just don’t see how I can rationalize being an SNO. Is there a “hockey stick” point where it will be worth it if I add more storage?
My initial motivation for joining was to use STORJ for offsite backup of my personal files and offset that cost by being an SNO, but I’m not sure that will work. Please correct my logic here! Thanks!
i you have node full, then there is almost no trafic any more, therefor no new data and no upload. Because most of data is test data and testers upload and download only fresh data. In some point all test data will be deleted, then we will see real world.
Different types testing will commence soon which should also benefit already full nodes with download egress traffic. Please don’t expect testing patterns to stay the same and make decisions based on previous months. If you have just been online for 4 month, still most of your payouts are not immediately paid out but held back. Over time you will receive a greater fraction of your total earnings so it would be best to stay online over the long term. Adding more storage now also will allow you to be ready with another vetted node by the time we go to production, and be able to get full traffic right from the start.
Thanks, that helps a lot!
It is something not normal, to get my money i have to spend about 10Eur to by Etherium to pay for swap ot transfer. It is absolutly not normal. All normal coins for transfer taking in same coin. And most wired in this, is that most of this 10 eur i have to pay for bying etherium not for etherium itself.