All right, now payment question seems way more difficult than it should be. Way of payment is a secondary thing, and I certainly do not want to give it more time and work than I spend on operating a node. From my perspective, payment scheme should be:
a. Convenient.
b. Simple.
c. Safe.
I am kind of uneasy with the idea of introducing more payment layers, since it will require more operations to get to the goal of SNO - local currency.
If there is no way around other than increasing payment threshhold - then so be it, but going L2 just makes things less convenient and more difficult.
Anyway, If I got it right from all those discussions about Ethereum network going POS, this problem of high fees will solve itself in foreseeable future without a need to go back and forth with zkSync.
Presumably there is some future compensation for you then in terms of stock options.
Pretty standard. I worked for a number of corporates and everyone was on their own contract and bonus rates depending on performance with annual reviews. One would presume the younger employees would still need at least a percentage of cash income to pay their bills. I doubt rents are cheap in Silicon Valley.
Thatās funny. There are no stock options. Storj isnāt a public company. Whatever stock is held is by private individuals, of which, Iām not one of them. Nobody has bought me a lambo yet either. Iām a long time member of the Community. Alexey and I are some of the oldest people still doing work for the company next to a handful of others. We both got involved long before anyone offered us any kind of compensation. I worked on developing software that worked against the API in Storj v2 and helped to answer developer questions. I also built a troubleshooting application for use by node operators to help diagnose the issues they were having. Didnāt get paid for this. I worked on this project because I believed in it, and I liked the people behind it. I am now compensated but I wonāt discuss how, and it is not in cash or stock options. I maintain a full time day-job at a major bank (As does Alexey, different banks) and Storj is a part-time project for both of us.
Iām aware it isnāt currently but that didnāt mean it isnāt the ultimate aim - it also may not be of course.
As for the rest, thankyou for discussing your situation. I come from an Industrial IT background myself as I hated working for companies like banks. it took me around the world so I canāt really complain.
āReducing the L1 payout threshold from 25% to 10%ā
This would be another ākick in the assā for SNOs who prefer the L1-Payments and another step in a silent movement of taking the payout-fees from Storj to the SNOs.
Very bad, nothing learned from the last payment decisions in my opinion 
Why are you forcing us to use a third-party L2-service where SNOs has to take the fees?
A bonus for the people who wants to use the service is ok, but you cannot introduce one malus after the other for the ones who use the main payout-method (L1) you decided for by design.
Iām with you on the complexity argument. I didnāt want to jump in with zkSync without knowing how it works underneath. But the truth is that knowledge isnāt really necessary to use it. It should be very well possible to create simple instructions on how to change payout to zkSync and then how to activate and transfer tokens out. I truly believe this can be simplified a lot.
As for ETH2.0ā¦ You shouldnāt expect that will eliminate L2 solutions. PoS will help, but it wonāt be enough alone to solve all scaling problems on Ethereum. L2 solutions are firmly expected to be the future of Ethereum.
I see. Well, I hope L2 will be convenient enough one day, then.
I enabled zkSync for my nodes, so why not?
There are many news are coming
Blog - Ethereum Wallet & DeFi (and I heard it allow swap on L2 - need a confirmation though)
So I believe there would be an L2 exchange sooner or later (I know your desire 
)
Doesnāt work for internationals.
No, we cant because of legal reasons.
If you can implement or offer other options like automated wrapping on popular for SNO blockchains, where we can call an API and send STORJ tokens - it would be nice.
Please, note - we would not like to spent time to implement functions on other blockchains - itās out of our scope and goals: we offer a decentralized encrypted cloud storage, not blockchains.
Anything requires migration to other blockchain would not be implemented any time soon, even if not take into account useless of such migration. As soon as it would be more popular - we will be in the same position. Just do not want to waste time and money for another attempt.
Is it not clear enough? 8TB-24TB, and allowed minimum is 550GB. There is no relations to earnings, I have to agree. But the earning is not mentioned anywhere in technical guide except FAQ section.
You always can use the recommendation from there: How do I estimate my potential earnings for a given amount of space and bandwidth? - Storj Docs
Thanks. But Iām a real person, I was come here as a SNO and I like the idea of the project. I can be not happy with some decisions as well. I always trying to show my position, and help people to solve problems and send information to the team collected from the Community, so please do not think that my account is used by someone else 
I am a long time Storj SNO. Went trough previous version and now I guess 2 years running a storage node. Not much space, just above 2TB. So if I get equivalent of $10,- a month it is fine. But with this 10% suggestion I will get paid once a year if I am lucky. With 25% that was maybe every 3 months which was fine too. I am not looking to get a L2 wallet /address, pay the Eth fees to move to an exchange etc. Too much hassle for something I install and forget.
I understand the reasoning from Storjās perspective, but for a small SNO like me it is not being made easier or more attractive. And in the end that was the idea to make a few bucks, participate in a good initiative and share unused storage like that.
I do not know what way I will go at the moment. Stop the service or continue, but I thought to just pitch in.
But that is also wrong in the current environment. if someone had a 24TB of space on line they will in all likely hood consume the vast majority of the drive life before it even half filled. I had 4TB on line for 8 months before deleting one node. It only ever got to 2TB filled total. So, lets be generous and double filling rates with their variability and say after a year the SNO got to 6 TB. So, an 8TB drive wonāt fill in year 1. So, your own recommendations are off in the current environment with a 24TB being largely pointless with current data levels. Even with the greater power consumed it would make more sense to add 3 x 8TB drives over time as the node filled instead of 1 x 24TB. One can then spread the drive wear and not expend drive life for empty space.
It might not sound like it sometimes Alexey but I am very glad of your presence here - particularly after the departure of Jocelyn. I certainly donāt envy your day job supporting bankers.
Yes, and this is a suggested maximum. Not the technical limit - you can have more, much more, but it would not make any sense. Even 24TB would not be used accordingly Community statistics: Current month earnings vs total earned + total held
So, we usually recommend to start small, then add more if you have it.
I can compare your stat only with one of my youngest node - 12 months old, itās earned only $20 (including $6.78 in Held)
However itās only 780GB
And yes, itās with zkSync enabled.
Itās outdated info. I worked in the prof. aggregator in 2017-2018. One of the projects was a web-site for the second bank in Russia (by actives).
Currently Iām a Senior DevOps. Even if that should not be a position, more like way of work 
I set all my nodes to 100GB and they didnāt get banned (edit: to be clearer I set all but one node down to 100GB in order to try a super graceful exit on the nodes I donāt need anymore)
Yes, I know. You can make it happen. Can you say the same for novice?
There is no obvious financial and technical incentive to make less than 550GB. So this is make-a-little-sense-but-if-you-want minimum.
Technically the 500GB is a default minimum monitoring level, you need to know how to change it. With recommended 10% to keep free space itās become a 550GB
I wasnāt aware these were also listed there. Nice. I think itās pretty clear, but the title is requirements, while the main items in the list are recommendations. So itās still a little confusing.
Just dropping a suggestion here to make it a little clearer.
Ah, you would come into a lot of conflict with the guys I worked with on site.
My job was to get the Automation Engineers to be able to work with IT Professionals. Automation Engineers donāt like change and they like highly controlled releases with very long approvals for change. Doesnāt really fit with Devops at all. It was hard enough to get them to accept AV on the Engineering systems sometimes. You would chase a manager for a month just to get his signature for a change. It didnāt help when IT did a change to the Windows Domain that wiped out all the office computers across site including the CEOās!
But when you are controlling gas furnaces or liquid hot molten metal you can kinda understand why they freak out about it.
We also have some experience dealing with Russian Banks. My wife worked for a large Russian Company that has their own bank When they got hacked, her team were used to defeat the hackers and their reward was that they werenāt paid their salaries as management tried to cover the hole and took money back. So, they left. I think most of them went to Kaspersky.