I got lost tracking current status of payouts, what has been proposed and what implemented:
Can somebody who understands write it down clearly what did happen last few months and what is currently implemented?
June: paid normally.
July: not paid and still on hold. As @littleskunk confirmed:
“Entire July is on hold.”
August: what we received was a prepayment for August, estimated from the July numbers — not the July payout. Storj said any difference would be corrected with the next payout.
September: the plan is another prepayment for September, including the August reconciliation. As of now, that is the next payment expected.
So in short:
June = paid
July = still missing/on hold
August = prepaid
September = prepayment pending
One separate point, because it is becoming mixed into the payout discussion:
I have also provided Storj with detailed numbers and now a corrected “How to Survive without reducing SNO compensation V2”, rebuilt from the court filings and forum information.
The filed 12-week budget shows a $379k pre-financing gap. What Storj still has not demonstrated is how much of the remaining gap the SNO cuts actually solve, and why cutting SNO compensation is the last necessary step after the other available measures.
Instead, the latest answer was:
“I would not revisit the payout rate based on ideas and spread sheets. I would do it based on SQL queries.”
That is exactly the problem. We have numbers showing that the SNO saving is relatively small compared with the actual financial gap, while the operational consequences can be delayed and partly irreversible.
And in the Rightsizing discussion we even got this admission:
“I can shape the payout reduction in a way that it feels like 10% even if the payout gets reduce by almost 20%.”
For me, and for many others here, the conclusion remains the same: based on every number currently available, cutting SNO payouts is a very poor lever for solving Storj’s actual financial problem. If Storj has internal numbers proving otherwise, they should publish the calculation: the expected savings and the remaining gap after the cut.
At the same time, the position of some very vocal SNOs here seems to be that having a lot of free space is somehow unhealthy and proof that SNOs are earning too much.
I strongly disagree with that conclusion. A large amount of free capacity is also a safety buffer for the network. Reducing payouts enough to push larger operators away may reduce that buffer much faster than expected.
The real risk is not that Storj has “too much” free space. The real risk is pissing off enough large SNOs at the same time that several of them reduce capacity or leave, while Storj simply accepts the possibility that the repair system could then come under serious pressure.
That is a very large operational risk to take for a financial saving that, according to the numbers currently available, does not even appear to solve the actual funding gap.