Incentives and payments for making SNOs stay

Node Operators
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Recently I’ve seen a lot of posts popping up from people who have no easy way to exchange their STORJ into other crypto-currencies or sell them. The reason mostly seems to be that they don’t have any Ethereum to pay for the gas. It would be great if SNOs would receive a small payment of Ethereum so they won’t feel like their earnings are locked in their wallet. Perhaps this could be done as a token of appreciation after they’ve been online for x amount of time or perhaps after they’ve earned an amount of y STORJ total.

A single payment would help a lot of people out. When they’ve sent some STORJ to an exchange they can freely exchange their STORJ for Ethereum for future transactions after that. So this doesn’t need to be a large amount. However, if they need to buy Ethereum to pay for the gas there are often minimum purchase amounts involved. This is where a small gift can go a long way.

Other than that I think SNOs could really use some quality of life features mostly related to getting more information.

  • Have the dashboard display data for previous months
  • Display dollar amounts
  • Display paid out amounts including exchange rate at the time
  • Have metadata in the transaction that shows what satellite paid out and for what amount of bandwidth and storage it was paid out.
  • Display what amount is held in escrow and when half of it will be paid out to SNOs (this will give SNOs a strong incentive to stay or at the least exit gracefully instead of just turning off their node)

I think a lot of SNOs would also like to know what the network looks like (either globally or per satellite if globally is not possible)

  • How many nodes exist in your area (perhaps a map of node numbers)
  • How many nodes are there total
  • How much data is stored and free space available on the network

One last thing that is very important. SNOs need clarity about the uptime requirement. I think recent testing has shown that repairs don’t happen as often as previously expected. That slack in the network should in my opinion be used to loosen the uptime requirements. I know this is likely already being discussed internally, but this is a complaint that keeps coming back from many SNOs. A maximum of 5 hours down time is really hard for home users to ensure. If your node fails shortly after leaving for work it can easily take up to 12 hours for people to be able to resolve this. If you want home users to support this network, this should not lead to disqualification. I would suggest allowing up to 48 hours of down time before disqualifying the node. But I don’t have your data and numbers to calculate the added repair that would need to take place as a result of this decision. Either way, the allowed down time needs to be longer and better defined. Ex. A maximum of 48 hours of downtime in one calendar month (UTC).
I understand that loosening the official requirement could lead to some SNOs not taking downtime seriously enough. My suggestion would be to counter that with deeper and longer impact on reputation, rather than disqualifying a node. This should help make sure SNOs keep down time to a minimum whenever they can, without booting them of the network in situations where they simply can’t solve the issue within the required time.

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Right now it is very profitable to set up a new node, but not profitable at all to keep a node running. Hopefully that will resolve when the network starts being used for actual data instead of test data, which should hopefully have more bandwidth usage per TB stored. For example, last month I got 10 STORJ for a full node (disappointing) and 550 STORJ for a node that was not full yet (amazing). If I can expect 500STORJ/month for my node in production I’d be very happy to keep my node running and even set up more nodes, but for only 10STORJ I’m not going to worry about keeping my uptime above 99.3%

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hey - this is Jocelyn, the community manager: just wanted to say that I love reading this conversation

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Hi

I’m pretty new here, and I haven’t read the entire thread, so if this already have been said, sorry about that…

As a motivation, maybe there should be some kind ratingsystem? This could f.ex. be rated on:

  1. Actual upload/dowload throughput
  2. Uptime
  3. Storagespace

Combined this could give a score that had some effect on the payouts, what kind of data that was stored on the different nodes and based on expected performance (If there will be any kind of different expectations).

Or am I totally off?

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Hey @Putte
Great minds think alike! Reputation is a major part of our system. I noticed you mention above that your still getting acquainted with the platform - -you may find our post on Node Reputation interesting; I’ll DM it to ya

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@BrightSilence: Very detailed post :+1:.

I do agree with the idea of gifting some ETH to SNOs. Not a lot is needed but indeed, getting some ETH ourselves involves a large amount (in my case with AtomicWallet, I would have to purchase a minimum of €50 (USD 55.60) worth of ETH).

@Derkades:

Well I don’t know, I guess it depends on the idea of “very profitable” :slight_smile:

If one wanted to make a bit of money every month as an SNO, even though I do know that currently the Beta is not representative of what real usage will be like when the project goes live, my understanding right now is as follows:

  • First and foremost (as in before starting your Node), you need a STORJ Wallet. Not everyone is comfortable with crypto currencies so that’s a first difficulty to overcome. That said, it’s quite easy to install a Wallet, and StorjLabs’ documentation is okay on that matter I think.
  • Right now, my node provides roughly 500GB of egress data each month, and at the moment stores 1TB of data and counting. Let’s roughly estimate that it will get me $10 for bandwidth, and $1.5 for storage. That is a total of $11.5 per month.
    I know it’s likely to change when the node gets full and/or when the project is actually in production but let’s assume these figures stay stable over time in the future.
  • At current STORJ’s rate (1 STORJ = USD 0.108034), that would get me 106.448 STORJ, sent to my Wallet address.
  • I do not know of any platform that recognises STORJ as a currency that can be converted to fiat directly, which means I would need to use an exchange platform like Binance to convert my STORJ amount to BTC first.
    In order to send my STORJ balance to Binance, AtomicWallet requires me to pay a network fee of 0.00145278 ETH (USD 0.21)
  • Once on Binance, it tells me that if I were to sell 106 STORJ (it does not accept decimals for STORJ coins), I would get 0.00161756 BTC (USD 11.44).
  • Then, I need to send this BTC amount to another platform that can convert BTC to fiat. I chose a French one because I’m French… (no one’s perfect :grin:) and mostly because it will make my tax return easier to make: Paymium.
    For sending BTC, Binance takes a fee of 0.0005 BTC (USD 3.53). So i’d receive 0.00111756 BTC (USD 7.90).
  • Now! Still need to get real money out of my BTC balance. On Paymium, the fee for withdrawing to my fiat account is €0.99 (USD 1.10).
    Which means that (assuming such a small amount would be accepted) I would receive approximately USB 6.80 on my account.
  • But wait, my government is very proud to officially recognize and support crypto-currencies, because we are at the cutting edge of technology. A nice way to say that it’s taxed. Here in France, they tax 30% of crypto currency incomes. That would be a tax of USD 2.04.

That leaves me with a grand total of 6.80 - 2.04 (french tax) - 0.21 (ETH fee) = USD 4.55 net, for a month.
(and I’m not taking into account hardware wear-off quite hard to estimate anyway, or electricity costs which would be around USD 2.00 a month in my case)

Obviously, withdrawing earned STORJ to fiat every month doesn’t seem like a good idea, and the ratio between the gross STORJ amount and the final net amount received on my account would be better if I were to withdraw my balance every 6 months for instance. But I’d rather get paid regularly than just once or twice a year…
Of course, all of this applies specifically to my personal situation, your mileage may vary.

But from where I stand, my conclusions are:

  • It’s far from being “very profitable” in my opinion, unless nodes prove to have a drastically higher Egress when the whole project is live (let’s hope so :wink:)
  • It’s incredibly cumbersome to get real money from our STORJ amount.

I think it’d be an improvement if StorjLabs were offering an easy way to directly convert our STORJ coins to fiat, or at least to a very popular currency like BTC.
Another approach would be to provide ways to spend directly STORJ coins for some services or goods…

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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Anyone managed to exchange STORJ tokens to something else ? Mewconnect doesn’t work!

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I guess it depends on the idea of “very profitable”

I based it on the following data:

  • For one of nodes (4TB of which 1.5TB used) I got 550 STORJ last month. That is including surge payments, but I expect that in production without surge payouts I’ll get similar revenues because the bandwidth usage will be higher (hopefully).
  • I already had some ETH so I didn’t need to go through that process. You may want to try Litebit, I think their minimum is way lower than €50.
  • I was able to convert 500 STORJ to 0.39613355 ETH using some online acountless trading service. Very convenient and the fees aren’t too bad. I don’t know what the rates were back then, but with the current exchange rates (coinmarketcap average) it would be $52.2 of STORJ → $52,5 of ETH. IIRC back then it was something like $60 of STORJ to $59 of ETH.
  • According to litebit it will trade that 0.39613355 of ETH for €48.36 which is decent
  • Currently I haven’t made any effors to comply with my country’s tax laws (oops) but we don’t have the ridiculous 30% tax here in the Netherlands. If you make an actual profit (not a “not even worth your time” profit) you will have to register as a company. If your turnover is below a certain amount (in the thousands of euros), you won’t need to pay taxes.
  • TL;DR; After exchange rates I got 90% of my money, even though I was using an accountless exchange which has relatively high fees and during the time I waited ETH went down a couple of %.
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Maybe I need to change country :smile:

Really, 550 STORJ in one month? I agree that if it were to stay that high, it would be interesting!
I’m far from getting that amount of traffic per month at the moment.

Thanks for sharing your feedback, I guess it clearly shows nodes aren’t equall at all, depending on our location, connection and other things still unclear to me ^^

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Today nodes are depending on developer/tester location, whet storj start working, client are all over the world, so location will not make any big sence as now. Today most of data are goind from german satelite.

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Yeah, it highly unpredictable and mainly dependent on bandwidth. My other node was already full so didn’t get any new test data. I only got 10 STORJ for that one.

EDIT: I meant that the income mainly depends on the bandwidth you are getting, which indeed depends on the latency

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It’s more based on latency than bandwidth since individual transfers are quite small. I very often see people say they lose the race while having a 1gbit connection. It seems latency matters more. So yes, NL is a good place to be for now. I can confirm this. But I’m sure this will change when traffic moves to more customer based than Storj-testing based.

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What about profit-sharing?

Many companies do this to keep employees motivated and engaged in what they do.
SNOs would probably be enclined to take good care of their nodes if a part of what StorjLabs earn was redistributed amongst SNOs.
That’d be even more motivating to see StorjLabs succeeds, because the more it would be successful, the higher profit-sharing would be.

Some would probably say that it’s what they do already by paying SNOs for bandwidth and storage, but I would argue that employees receiving profit-sharing still get paid fixed salaries as well.

Is that an option SorjLabs thought about?

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Well, employees indeed get a fixed salary which is independent from profit. SNOs literally share the profit they make with Storjlabs. Additionally if Tardigrade takes off that will likely have a positive effect on the value of STORJ, which would also be an indirect way of profit sharing. I like the idea in concept though.

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I really don’t see the value of STORJ coins as a potential benefit, as StorjLabs pay the equivalent of a fixed amount of USD per TB, that they then convert to STORJ.
They do not pay a fixed amount of STORJ per TB.

If tomorrow 1 STORJ = 10 USD, we’ll simply get 1/100th of what we get right now.

The only “one shot” advantage would be for SNOs who collected and kept a lot of STORJ in their Wallet when it was worth very little value. Then for them yes, if the value of STORJ coins were to raise substantially, their amount of capital would be worth a lot of money (like people who had a few BTC laying around, before it becomes incredibly famous and worthy).

This said, the opposite situation could arise too: If a new SNO joins the network when STORJ value is high, he or she would collect very few STORJ coins and would “lose” money in the following month if the STORJ value were to decrease.

In a way yes. However, what about an additional share not so much based on the performances of our Nodes?

  • It wouldn’t change much what large SNOs earn, because most of their profit would be based on their large storage capacity and their bandwidth.
  • It would make the difference for small SNOs, especially if it turns out their Egress traffic is not that high.

I might be wrong, but I suppose that the STORJ network will mainly be made of small SNOs, because most people will have a few TBytes available/unused at hand, less people will have 100s of TBytes, and just a handful of SNOs will have PBytes available for STORJ…
Hence, I think it’d a good thing to find a way to motivate small SNOs so they don’t end up with just a few dollars a month, which may not be enough to make they want to carry on maintaining a Node.

Glad to hear that :slight_smile:.
I think this calls for some thought.

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Unfortunately that couldn’t really work, if a node is not economically viable to keep running it should be stopped, and not survive on “donations”. It’s not like you get a bit of pity-bitcoin when mining using a raspberry pi, you get none at all.

Getting more money with better hardware motivates people to not use absolute craptastic hardware which would be bad for the network.

If tomorrow 1 STORJ = 10 USD, we’ll simply get 1/100th of what we get right now.

I don’t think I understand, if the STORJ price rises we’ll get less STORJ tokens, but we’ll be able to sell it for more. If tomorrow 1 STORJ = 10 USD I’d sell all my STORJ tokens and feel like a millionaire.
EDIT: Maybe you mean that we don’t get more money in the future if the STORJ price rises? You can’t really expect Storjlabs to pay a fixed amount of STORJ regardless of the STORJ price

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I agree wit @Pac, payment should be based on the native coin for SNOs.
SNOs invest in STORJ by sharing and enabling the network, if you are here from the beginning you would be very happy I assume.
I participate also in some other crypto communities and also there you will get paid in the native currency solely, it’s all in the game, could be profitable, maybe not!
Let’s not make a fool of each other, It is all about believing in the product and in the end also make something out of it!
I for one believe in crypto and also in STORJ as a procuct, very interesting what some companies have developed to make use of the resources available and not used!
Hardest thing for Storj.io is to keep SNOs bonded, rewards is one thing, maybe need to look more at uptime and reputation on the SNOs and give higher rewards for that.

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Hey Jocelyn,

Can you share the link with me also?
Very interested to read more about this.

Thanks in advance…

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I think the most important thing is that the network now start with real customers and come out of beta

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But it also highly depends on how the clients use the network. If a lot of the data stored is backups that are almost never retrieved, then even with good hardware I may end up with no traffic.
The backups will then be deleted and new ones uploaded, so a node can theoretically end up with constant ingress traffic, no egress traffic and constant disk usage.
And it’s not like the files are tagged with “live data - will be retrieved a lot” or “backup - will only be retrieved for audits” so that I could use slower/cheaper drives for the backup files and normal drives for the live data files. Which means that if my node gets full, I need to buy normal drives to expand it.

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