Let's talk about the elephant in the room: The Storj economic model (node operator payout model)

I think it’s just tough to determine a working economic model at this very moment because we just don’t know how storj customer base will develop. Storj charges the same amount of money regardless of the customers usecase (hot or cold storage, multi-region availability etc.) and therefore has great potential to increase prices in the future or generate additional revenue with additional services.

The subsidy is only a fraction of the monthly expenses of the company and adjusting it now won’t make too big of a difference. With future success and additional features we will have less moving parts and therefore will be able to judge better how to adjust the payouts to meet reality.

Actually I am more concerned about the future scalability of the nodes than the current burn of storj for the egress.

As for now costs for the node operators are very low (often just attaching otherwise unused disks on systems that already run 24/7 anyway).

Let’s assume storj is very successful and steers into exabyte territory. Then of course subsidised payouts are not an option anymore. Additionally at some point the resource of “free hardware/disks” from node operators will be exhausted. To be able to grow available disk space you need to buy hardware and still be profitable. But if you don’t get a discount if you buy a couple of HDs and you can’t choose a location where electricity is inexpensive how can you compete with the big guys?

On the other hand if we’re at this point storj made an even greater splash on the market and this opens up new possibilities…

In other words: there is no need to change the payout model now. Once we have more data on how the customer base grows and what kind of traffic it attracts it’ll be easier to determine a model that will ensure sustainability.

Still, I’m looking forward to see what changes storj will propose :smiley:

Edit: was not aware that 12.5% of the full time staff had to go :frowning: , leaving the subsidised payouts as they are in a phase of growth while firing 12.5% of full time staff might at least be morally questionable (my personal point of view)