Sure, Storj still takes on some risk, but $27.77 provides plenty of incentive for GE already and it’s no worse than the current system. The alternative would be for the node to make no income at all in the first few months. I think that’s a bigger problem for node retention in the early months.
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You’re right. Let them spin until they fall apart. The oldest one I’ve got is 11 years old, but I’m using it for temporary downloads (torrents and such). Lately, sometimes it crashes. Switch off, switch on and it’s good again. But if it was holding a node I think I was already disqualified.
I was thinking more along the lines of a SNO that has n disks/nodes, the last one fills up and he buys a new disk. Instead of starting a new node on the new disk, I’d say it would be better to copy the oldest node to the new disk and start the new node on the oldest disk. Odds are that when a disk fails, it will be holding a very small node.
Anyway, my personal statistics tells me that spinning hours and data R/W are important. Maybe your 15 year old disk had an easy life siting in a PC that was turned on once a day(?). My 11 year old disk was born inside a 24/7 NAS. I had 4 equal disks, this one is the last still working. Oddly, it was the only one that ever had bad sectors since a young age. Bad sectors are good…
My file server has drives with ~70k power-on hours. One drive has failed (in a rather nasty way where it would hang the SATA HBA), the other ones work OK.
However, the drives in my file server do not see high IOPS, I also have a script that accesses them once a minute or so to prevent them from unloading the heads.
Ah… you see more incentive when it’s Storj owing you?
We should probably move the Graceful exit to a new topic. This is geting huge.
The problem with Graceful exit, as I see it… We start geting data at an increased rate, the small HDDs/nodes become a rarity by the day. I think the big majority of new nodes are on bigger HDDs, with the top tier of 16-20TB becoming more popular. These new nodes will get full (hopefuly) before EOL, and I realy don’t see anyone transfering 14-18TB of data to a new drive, just because it will take very long time and will get disqualified. robocopy takes over 24h/TB, so is not an option for more than 10TB of data, rsync will take the big part of HDD access time from engress, and with all the rechecking and resyncing, will take probably a month, resulting is disqualification also… I didn’t used rsync, so maybe I’m wrong, but this seems logical to me. So in conclusion, the big majority of nodes in 10-15years will not Graceful exit, they will just crash and die. This is not because the SNO is careless or malintended. And I don’t see anyone pressing the Graceful exit button just because he starting to see a few bad sectors poping out.
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Imposing collateral may scare off people from becoming a SNO. One of the reasons I never did SIA was that they wanted collateral up front.
The current held amount approach was good way to avoid the collateral issue.
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I would like to see any participation from Storj team, they know this kitchen from inside and can run this discussion. Because it more looks like monolog of SNO’s but shold be a dialog.
If you can, please join the twitter spaces in about 15 min. I do my best to keep up with the conversations here; Clearly I can do more to better participate and respond more frequently.
The twitter spaces starts at the top of the hour, so please join if you can.
After the twitter spaces I’ll go back through and try to put some more content in this channel as well this evening and over the weekend.
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I will listen it, cant speak as it is late evening here, and children’s sleeping, but thank you.
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I joined Storj as a SNO about three years ago. I consider myself a hobbyist as I do not see a commercially viable path to be a node operator. In the last three years I have accumulated about 20 TiB of data and 2500 Storj tokens (worth about $750 now) accepting as much data as the network will send me.
I just calculated that as a commercial node operator if I could fill 10PiB, it would cost me roughly $5/TiB/month.
I do believe that there is more data demand than there is capacity, that demand varies widely varying willingness to spend on storage. Since Storj manages both the network, pricing and sales, it falls upon Storj to come up with a strategy to fit an economic model. Today I simply do not see what Storj is planning in order to shift from being a hobbyist network to a commercial network.
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I should apologize to the community if this isn’t clear - the majority of the growth and adoption in terms of volume of data stored and revenue generated is coming from traditional web2 businesses and educational institutions who are transitioning from other web2 services, mostly AWS S3.
We have great customers in Web3 - early adopters like Pocket, Ankr, Harmony, Oortech and others showed leadership and helped as references to break into Web2.
Now we’re growing with innovative companies taking advantage of the performance, security and economics of the service like CIMMYT, DiRAC/Univ. of Edinburgh, Atempo, Inovo, Iconik, ixSystems, Hammerspace, Metastage, Cloudflyer and more. These are established and established and credible tech companies.
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so as they only transfer data to storj, thats why usage is so low now, they not use it yet?
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That’s not good. On average you don’t make 5$/TB/month.
And if you were a business, big enough, you would buy disks much cheaper…
That is the reality of running a real business. You don’t buy cheap garbage, you buy something that will have the highest ROI (long running HDD with low energy consumption), I also factored in everything it takes, a rack in a real data center, labor, network.
That’s not my point. If you buy 1000 disks, you can get it for far less.
Anyway, you’re kind of wrong. You buy the highest ROI, right, but sometimes the highest ROI is garbage (short running HDD’s).
Last time I read Backblaze report on disks, they presented data that showed Hitachi and Toshiba disks had 10 to 100 times smaller failure rates. All things considered, they said they prefer changing Seagate and WD disks frequently. It’s cheaper than buying the Japanese disks.
Lucky for us, the prices are around the same if you just buy 1 disk. Turns out when you sell garbage you can make huge discounts on large buys. Hitachi just can’t do it because they don’t manufacture garbage…
Actually these numbers are based on high quality enterprise systems factoring in discounts that I am familiar with running much larger operations. $5TiB/month is all in, not just disks but running a storage business. That is a typical break even for a business running 10PiB of storage (assuming the disks are nearly full).
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You’ll earn back your investment in roughly 20 months. I don’t know what HDD’s you buy, but that HDD would still be in warranty if it fails at that time… Most HDD’s easily last 5 years. And usually much more. In 5 years that $400 HDD will earn you $3000. Subtract $400 for initial cost and $300 for energy cost (using $5 per month for that), that’s $2300 of profit. And every additional year would earn you $800 - $60 in energy costs.
So what part doesn’t make sense?
Furthermore after 34 months that HDD is full and you have made $1200 -$400 - $170 (energy) = $630 profit. Plenty to buy a new HDD and keep making even more profit on 2 nodes now.
Of course all of this feels a lot more manageable if you can start with HDD’s you already own and only spend money earned with Storj (which is what I did). Especially if you can long term use that HDD space for personal use as well (which at this point is only partially true for me).
I’m gonna outcompete you… I have no costs other than HDD purchase and energy use. And the above calculation assumes Exos HDD’s with a 5 year warranty. Not cheap garbage. I won’t have PB scale, but 100 node operators like me would. And we’d make plenty of money while you lose money with your estimate.
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Unfortunately I couldn’t be at todays twitter space live, but I listened back when I got home. I want to post some stuff mentioned that was relevant to the discussion here. But I recommend also listening to it for full context. I would hate to quote people out of context, but there is always a danger to that when picking snippets. Listen to it here: https://twitter.com/storj/status/1593695583335653376
Thanks @john for providing some more context in the following quotes.
Twitter transcripts aren’t perfect, so I corrected the text between brackets.
I think that what everybody expects is certainly that [we] will make a change to what we’re doing with the [held amount] and then also what we’re doing with the the amount of money that we pay out for egress currently
So here we have the first hints at changes that might impact Storage node operator payouts. Held amount has been extensively discussed in this topic, so we can have some ideas of what might be considered. Of course the more scary one in this quote is the mention of a possible change in egress payout. I’m not going to speculate here what that change would be (beyond what I already did in the top post), I’ll leave that up to everyone to do on their own. I would like to mention that John mentioned several times that the intention is to always ensure running a node is rewarding and that changes won’t be sudden and will be extensively discussed with the community beforehand.
how we’ll use surge payments
Possibly referring to a way to bridge the gap between current payout system and future changes or to manage supply in times of need. But no additional specifics were given.
The second area that that we are focusing on also is doing work around the actual unit economics of the storage layer itself and making sure that that we’re doing the most efficient things with the storage so that as an operator of satellites that it’s also rewarding endeavor for people generating business on the service.
Some of these things were also discussed in this topic. Like changing RS parameters, segment size and making repair more affordable are likely part of this. But again no specifics beyond this were mentioned. But I’d say, keep the ideas coming.
And then the last thing is, is also looking at at what we’re what our, what our prices are publicly in terms of what we’re selling, what features are valuable and customer feedback as well.
because in some cases what we’re offering is uh you know at at a very reasonable price today it’s a huge value added service and there isn’t necessarily an analogy or comparison at that price point anywhere on the market today and so there there may be opportunities where we’re we’re under selling some of the things that we’re offering.
This makes sense, but I’d say it’s a matter of timing here. You want to grow popularity and recognition before raising prices especially on existing offerings. Of course new offerings with different requirements could be launched at higher prices as well. Perhaps in combination with some changes in RS parameters and segment size. Different products could be offered aimed to optimize for different use cases.
It was also reiterated that some of these ideas would be shared with the community in a little more detail starting in December. Followed by a white paper in Q1 with more extensive detail. So I’m looking forward to those discussions.
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You need to see the full quote:
more than I earn
To say it with your own words:
And you have to keep paying $10 per TB to Storj, I wonder what incentive you are seeing?
You’re comparing a held back that is built up only once with earnings that return every month. I know you’ve seen the calculation I posted now, so I’m not sure what part you aren’t getting about this.
1TB earns you roughly $3.30 every month but the held back for that 1TB builds up to $10 only once.
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