Is 40-50TB really the end game for sno. That’s $100/month, is it worth it if you also have a job?
I’ve been aiming for 40TB since my first post How much storage is online?
But I wanted to go to 1PB later Petabyte class SNO
It kind of is, right now.
We don’t know how things will evolve.
However there is a possibility that the more demand there is, the more SNOs will join the network, in which case the “end game” as you put it would kind of stay roughly stable.
Everyone’s gonna have their own opinion on that, but as long as it’s some little extra on the side covering let’s say the internet connection for instance, I say why not 
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I see it as an investment into the future. At the moment it might be max $100/month but if bitcoin rises, in 10 years it might effectively be $600/month.
I made that mistake in the past to mine with GPUs and convert bitcoin to EUR so I could pay my electricity of 150€/month and at the time btc was $5k-10k. If I hadn’t sold all my bitcoins, I’d have like $20k now lol
So now I keep my earnings as investements and the 5€/month electricity are just an additional investement. I only converted 600€ so I could buy more harddrives.
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I’m wondering if the STORJ token could rise much though. It’s pretty unclear to me how tokens’ prices get defined and what makes them fluctuate to be honest…
This is indeed a major concern of mine as well.
Like most currencies in crypto world it’s probably purely speculation. people buying and selling, supply and demand.
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Well there’s all the locking of tokens and this kind of thing going on which though I’ve been reading about, i must admit am still a bit confused on.
If you are just mining to get tokens to hold, speculating they would go up - wouldn’t it be less risky to just buy the tokens?
I look at this more of a arbitrage opportunity between what i can manage to setup nodes for versus what they can earn and less of an opportunity to obtain storj cheaper than just buying it.
the locked tokens is for our and token speculators benefit, Storj Labs have high amounts of tokens, because the made and control the token and these are used as their runway to start the company.
then there is a lot of crypto / investment related stuff which makes it nice to keep some tokens out of circulation for a extended period, to help control price and maximize profits on selling them…
ofc token speculators see this as grossly unfair, and to protect against the speculators staying away for that reason, large portions of tokens are locked in a rolling lock which goes for a certain period… this makes speculators able to trust that Storj Labs won’t all of a sudden without warning dump 100 million tokens in one deal, just to manipulate the price or cashout
the rolling lock basically just means they get a chance to unlock each portion every 2 years or so … and then either they lock it again or take it into circulation…
the token value is kinda relative, it’s not really fixed to anything in reality… so it’s basically just an arbitrary number, meaning it can go much lower or much higher there is literally no real limitations…
aside from ofc that storj labs had 200mil or whatever of them… so the higher it goes the more leverage that is… and because customer gets discounts by using storj tokens… then there will always be a demand for them, thus to raise the price all storj have to do is to limit the supply…
so long as the network is popular…
i think that’s about it… imo
ofc i’m not your local witch doctor nor financial advisor…
eventually when all the rolling locks are done, they will or should go up… ofc it’s a very complex puzzle to really understand it, which is why we have to cut it down to some generalizing concepts that we can understand in the limited time we can allocate for it.
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15$ pr TB so 15000$ in just harddrives, and then keeping everything running will most likely be your full time job…
that’s a big investment in something that isn’t an triple a
and then in the first year it would be like 1500$ in power, + servers + security… if you start building a datacenter then you will need proper surge protection, cooling… doing 1PB would easily cost you like 30k during the first year.... if not 50k
not sure if the 80% builder rule apply to this… 80% of the build price will be man hours.
with that we are into the 150k$ range of project cost of the first year…
i’m not saying it’s impossible… but i recently built my own near 100tb setup… and it’s certainly not as easy as one might think if one hasn’t dealt with these aspects of IT Engineering before.
to get more data you just need to cover more subnets, getting to 1PB is a big mountain to climb… so good luck…
100 drives is nothing. It’s not even 1/4 of a rack.
But yes I agree with what you say
Very true, 100 drives is nothing. The SuperMicro SAS Expansion units are 4U and hold 45 drives each… So you could easily have 1000’s of drives in one rack.
But even if say you had 100 IPs readily available as well.
It would still take quite some time to fill them up. Additionally with the new captcha to generate node id’s, it takes for f’n ever if you need to generate 100 node IDs at once. Then of course monitor nodes for random crashes on that scale starts to become a pita as well.
I would say that in general, setting up 50TB of storage space is very easy (one command in zfs infact), however filling that space with paid data from StorJ in a reasonable time - well that’s the unknown.
the problem as i see it is also a bit in the competitive aspect and the research of setting everything up… it will be a lot of work for somebody that doesn’t know a lot about most of the stuff to begin with…
many factors will play in… power, how big is your odds of the “data center” flooding and other such disasters, how much does electricity costs, how do you avoid the hardware going bad in the environment you create / end up with
the reason is set the costs so high isn’t for the basic hardware or setting it up… it’s just general numbers used for building stuff in general, the problem becomes that if one isn’t very aware of what one is doing or is testing while scaling, then one could easily make a critical mistake which could adversely affect the gear or even destroy it.
and then you would ofc also need to diversify it eventually just to ensure your entire setup isn’t completely dependent on storj.
it’s a bit like building a cold goods storage warehouse or something… you wouldn’t build it in a place where the electricity is expensive if you can avoid it… but there maybe reasons for wanting it… so you may solve the electricity issue… but the there is the question of roads, cost of the lot you are building on, the materials you are using … and you could very well end up building it and then realizing 30miles away there is a better location that also have a warehouse, but that location saves them on costs because they are near a harbor… or whatever… train
and all of a sudden you got this huge project completed which essentially cannot compete in the existing market because the research it was based on was flawed…
so yeah i set the costs kinda high, because i expect a ton of effort to go into that kinda stuff…
ofc you may have information you can use, or methods you have learned that can help you …
it’s not because the 100 drives isn’t easy, its the problem that you will need the most factors possible to work in your favor, i think scaling becomes easier… ofc i did learn a little while back that economy of scale apparently isn’t scaleable … 
isn’t that a funny sense of irony
it simply reaches a point where it’s no longer economically to keep scaling up… but in the beginning… scaling up reduces costs so starting up will most likely cost a lot more than when scaling to double the size…
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