That seems a little optimistic looking at previous months. This month so far is looking a little better than average though. But since previous months were around 600-700GB, I’m not yet going to assume this month is representative.
@DD7 I’ve updated the earnings estimator with more recent traffic data. It looks a little better, but because more data stored also means more data having a chance of being deleted, there is still a theoretical limit as to how much data a single /24 IP subnet could store. Which is currently around 80TB. At that point the amount of deletes and ingress will roughly match and there will no longer be a net growth.
Additionally about 25% of new ingress is deleted within the same month… so raw ingress numbers are not representative of node growth.
It can, but with current traffic it will take about 5 years to get there.
The network needs scale, not individual nodes. But when that scale is going to be needed, nodes will start filling up faster and faster. Currently every node with available space gets their share and clearly not more scale on nodes is needed at the moment. It’s simple supply and demand determining this requirement. But for the network to work best, it’s a lot better to have more nodes than to have larger nodes.
Also keep in mind for economic incentives that you are competing with pesky node operators like me, who use hardware that mostly wasn’t purchased for this purpose and devices that are online anyway. I have basically 0 costs. So do you think you can run a business with the associated costs when you are competing against people who don’t have to worry about those costs? Yet without any costs, I’ve made about $3000 since march 2019. I’ll take it. But I also would have taken $1000. It’s basically free money anyway.
Furthermore, Storj currently pays more to node operators than they make running the service. This is fine as long as there is a runway and there is still a substantial runway left. But payouts have to come down at some point to make it long term viable.
When this happens, you will see ingress for nodes with remaining free space go up quickly. This situation kind of resolves itself at that point. It will become much more interesting to start new nodes, existing SNO’s who can will expand capacity and new node operators will jump on the now much more profitable bandwagon.
Gotta love classic market effects.
None of this is really relevant. Individual nodes don’t matter at all for reliability in the network. Nodes are always going to run on low powered hardware, because they can run just fine on it. Anyone spending more than they have to is making a bad financial decision.
What those larger companies need to know is that the reliability of individual nodes is not important. All nodes are kept to certain standards and disqualified if they fall below those standards. Such that the network can ensure file retention to 11 9’s even if the nodes themselves run on raspberry pi’s or consumer NAS systems or whatever is available. That’s the whole point of Storj.
On a per storagenode (/24 subnet) level, I’m seeing this increase mostly since this month. Meaning demand this month is outpacing node availability. While that is encouraging, I tend to not get too excited when it’s just a single month. More ingress attracts more SNO’s and it may level out again. Keep em coming though. I’ll make sure to expand as needed as long as it’s profitable. Just this week I expanded my array with a 20TB HDD and started a new node on the 4TB HDD it replaced in addition to a 3TB HDD my dad no longer needed. So far it has always been worth it to expand, even though I don’t buy most of the space I add. That 20TB was expensive… but paid for with Storj earnings. As long as I can keep doing that, I’ll make sure to have plenty space available.
Yeah, this place is great. Most people love to share their experience and contribute to a better shared knowledge between node operators. Distributed knowledge on top of distributed storage. Gotta love it. 