They’re at least aware of it. @John responded to an earlier version of this alternative estimator here. March payment drastically low? - #67 by john
I should not that this is a rough estimate and it fluctuates a LOT. I have about 14TB since the last wipe in late August last year. So it may be a little more per month on average.
It seems like this is mostly what you’re responding to. This is still the case. The storj network works best if there are a lot of independently managed nodes around the world. From the network perspective this is best. But a SNO won’t care about that and when having more HDD space can make you more money, then you make sure you have more space. This isn’t necessarily a problem for the Storj network though. Each segment is still distributed across many nodes and there are plenty of nodes for the network to be strong and stable even if there are a few bigger ones. Additionally 1TB per month ingress, if they will even keep that up later on, already limits the biggest types of setups. In datacenters it would be no problem to quickly spin up petabyte scale nodes, but those will never fill up. Furthermore, we have not really seen a big impact on deletes of files. And it may be a while until we get a good idea of what normal deletes look like. Imagine backup scenarios, maybe after a year or two, you don’t need your daily backups/snapshots anymore. Eventually there may be some equilibrium, since, the more data you store, the more data will be deleted per month. Lets say 2% of data stored is deleted every month on average. If you have 50TB stored, that means 1TB is deleted every month and the ingress of 1TB average disappears in the same month. Since I don’t have enough good data on this right now to build this in to the estimator, that effect is currently not included. I think at some point you’ll see a natural effect of this evening out a little more.
So in short, I don’t think the Storj strategy is broken in any substantial way. For many things we are still in the early days and really don’t know what steady state usage on the network will look like. The estimator Storjlabs originally built made a lot of assumptions about what that steady state may some day look like. And I think many of those assumptions are very flawed. But I don’t think they signify bad intent or a broken strategy. The network is flexible enough that it can adjust to many types of usage patterns and we all have to learn and adapt to those as things go forward.