It really wasn’t for me, I received $54 because of the surge payout. Older nodes are seeing some benefit from downloads from the stefanbenten satellite. This means that nodes that are newer and didn’t get data from that satellite at the time are seeing much less in payouts, so there could be large differences. This is in part because the new testing satellite is still getting started and everyone is in the 25% payout period for that satellite. It also means that over time this payout will go up again.
I completely agree with you on the rest of your message though. Tardigrade being a viable and interesting business for both Storjlabs as well as their customers is good for SNOs as well. If brought it to the attention of a few people who might be interested as well. It’s actually a really interesting option for potential customers. And that’s important, but it also limits how much Storj can pay SNOs. I don’t think the payout is unfair, but I do think expectations are skewed. The official earnings estimator doesn’t really help here.
https://storj.io/storage-node-estimator/
Although I see it has been updated to be a little more reasonable, there are still major flaws in there. For example, on a 100mbit (you can’t set it higher) upload, it estimates 8.34TB of egress traffic regardless of how much data you have stored. The slider for storage goes up to 20TB, but even with that amount stored 8.34TB egress doesn’t seem realistic. It also assumes you will fill up 50% of your storage in the first month and it stays there from that point on. Again, not realistic.
Perhaps it is now possible based on the data collected so far to determine a realistic percentage of egress compared to disk storage. Lets for argument say that’s about 10%. Perhaps it’s also fair to assume you get about 1TB growth per month on a good connection. This would depend on download speed, so you might incorporate that by saying 1TB for 50mbit and lower for lower connection speeds, but not higher for higher speeds as there is no longer an advantage above 50mbit for the most part. We also know that during roughly the first month you only get 5% of traffic due to vetting. Based on this you could build a much more realistic estimator… so I did.
Lets assume these inputs:
- 6TB available storage
- 50mbit download
- 25mbit upload
Storjlabs estimator:
My more realistic alternative:
Most importantly this sets the expectation that earnings will be crap during the first few months, but you shouldn’t be discouraged by that because it will get a lot better. However, there are limits to earnings potential in relation to storage size.
For example, if you only share 1TB, it doesn’t matter how fast your connection is, you’re not going to make a lot of money.
Needless to say the official estimator goes a bit nuts on this scenario. Please note, I set it to 1TB, but it assumes only 50% will be used. That’s why it shows 0.5TB.
It also shows that sharing virtually endless storage space doesn’t make you a lot of money right away either. Because it simply takes time to fill that up.
That said, it’s still optimistic on how fast it will fill up. And perhaps egress estimation can be tuned a little. I think this shows that it’s worth it for SNOs to run a node and sets an optimistic enough expectation, without leading to massive disappointment down the road.
I hope something closer to this will be considered. If anyone wants to play with my version of this estimator, I made it available read only at this link. Please copy it to your own account to enter your own values to test with.
Edit: Additional note. Egress is capped by upload speed in case people have relatively low upload speed. I used a bandwidth calculator to find: 100 Mbit/s is equivalent to 32.8725 Terabytes (TB) per month. So mbit/3 is roughly the max TB egress you could get. But because egress can be spiky and it’s not realistic to assume your entire upload will be used constantly, I went with mbit/10 as a more realistic option. Assuming that about a third of your connection would be used for egress.