What? thats the minimum requirement to run 25 nodes! TOP russian tech!
Why am I the only one who dosenât get WT⌠is that chair doing there? 
Where do you live to earn that?
Silicon Valley. Entry level engineering salary is 100-150k USD/year. Plus benefits, stock grants, etc.
Have a look: https://www.levels.fyi/
But cost of living is also appropriately obscene of courseâŚ
So for the vast majority of us, common people, no matter where you live and how much you make, at the end of the month you can afford the same things. 
The mirage of money!
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Wow, really incredible looking that from Spain.
What exactly? Could you please elaborate?
I think he reffers to 10K/month sallary. It looks incredible for a lot of people. Imagine living with 2-300$/month, or less.
that I can understand. However, if you forced to spend $8-$9k to just live, wellâŚ
It doesnât really matter, if the survival took 90% of your income, right? PhilosophyâŚ
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Wow, if u scale the storage node taking into account the PCI, these areas should have big farms to have a decent Storj income, not just pennies
i mean ⌠why not? you mean dont run it natively using btfrs? or dont run it on VM on btfrs?
I was talking about the salary. Itâs about 1.000âŹ/month in Spain.
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Preferably - neither first nor the second, especially - second.
Otherwise you will have a higher chances to be a permanent participant of this thread:
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Itâs umm⌠thatâs the one. Like I said, the biggest issues I am facing right now is the fact that when it rains outside, it also rains on the inside 
The chair is there because it was wet downstairs
The wall that the equipment is plugged into (the one on the left) is going to be torn down in the near future. Iâll have a real electrician redo the wiring when time comes.
On a day-to-day basis and ânowâ, yes, absolutely.
The difference, however, manifests when you are trying to save for retirement: it takes the same effort to save 10% of your compensation no matter where you are; but doing so in HCOL areas yields more money in the absolute terms, allowing to retire earlier and move to LCOL if desired.
This makes for a really crappy community: nobody is emotionally invested in making things better locally â majority plans on leaving after completing the proverbial rat race.
Well sorry for offtopic down below, You started first!
to make even, hereâs how my nodes looked like 4 years ago:
^^
just kidding.
This is the tower i used for my HDDs:
2nd case, just for HDDs, bcoz no space in first oneâŚ
it was sooo 3-4 years ago.
Now its all smooth and cultural. Tho in the same place under the closet,
but in 1 case, some Fractal Design 7 XL case like this:
^^
Looking once a day if everything is ok isnât a work, for 250$? netto? totally worth it.
the goal is to provide absolute minimum for food and rent, and gain as much time, free from â9 to 5â pointless job, so one can rather pursuit his goals like coding, or entrepreneur on heâs own.
cons are, sometimes You eventually need to spend multiple hours of intervention, if something Fâd up, like hardware or software failure.
Not sure if investing 2500$ in stock brings You 100% back after some 8-18 months like storj did.
With STORj it was possible when pay rate was bigger.
but, imagine it would NOT pays for running a STORj node. Who would bother?
Or imagine it pays only to cover nodeâs costs, who would bother either?
(by bother i mean the amount of unexpected problems, time to learn how to, what to, in order to make the thing actually work smooth with what You have, and not mess Your own stuff, or without any drastic changes, like filesystems, etc. then devs fâup something, and You have to clean up by Your self,
...)
or devs dont say clearly what hardware expectation are real to meet (happens to be a lot more ram needed that expected per a node, it wasnât clear from the beginning, it wasnât even clear that the HDD would be filewalking files all the time, beside its normal egress/ingress job, and You shall avoid VMâs, but You kinda canât, if You need to fill HDDs fast to make a sense out of it, if You have many disks in 1 home server, aka, gaming the 24 rule which many did, and many does⌠many things wasnât clear, gotto find out by experience)
Or imagine it would pay just up to 2 times above costs, SOME would bother (like me)
BUT the clue is: that âsome like meâ, its NOT ENOUGH for the network to succeed.
If we have like 31PB stored right now, and the goals was 1 Exabyte (1000PB) and 1PB = 1000TB.
We have now equivalent of like ~2137 HDDs of like 14,5TB size.
if i got like 10 of them,
it means the whole network is like 214 guys like me.
And Devs wanted to make it like 1 Exabyte, means there should be approximately 6900 guys like me up to this point or soon, if the goals of 1Exabyte shall be meet.
How You gonna incentive people to do that?
i mean sure You can repeat that it only âshall help reduce expenses, not make profit.â then who will bother to operate a node in enough numbers?
Thank You, thatâs all the point.
P.S. rising payout to attract more hosts is possible, just a matter of tuning the processes, there is enough of cake to share. The company doesnât have to cut 50% from profit, imagine Uber would cut so much, i believe healthy companyâs usually cut 5-25%.
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Thatâs such a janky setup. I love it! 
I wonder⌠are drives hanging on ceiling still a thing? Or they managed to upgrade to more IT-ish setups?
Ok, here is mine, with the lid off. Rather boring:
But that does not scale, and is not sustainable. Hardware deteriorates, you have ever increasing maintenance costs.
Generally, 4% is considered acceptable annual withdrawal rate. So to get $250/month forever you just need $75k invested in something line total stock market ETF. Thatâs it. Zero work, infinite supply of $250/month. Nothing beat this.
Mmm⌠I love my job. Itâs not pointless, and I enjoy every second of it. Have been in the past 19 years at the three different employers I had. I would totally volunteer to do exact same job anyway if money was not an object. I donât understand people who voluntarily take on a job they hate, effectively throwing away 40 hours of their life every week. Why? Any job pays money, why not pick the one you will be happy doing?
But I digress.
Everyone, who understands the purpose of the project and its value proposition. Node requires zero additional maintenance, as you said, so anything it pays is pure profit. Hence, it does not matter what it pays, as long as it is greater than zero.
If, on the other hand, it âpays for hardwareâ then this only means itâsâ paying too much: storj could pay for VPSs across the globe themselves â why would they need you?. This encourages opportunistic behavior of new storage node operators who now embark on the project for all the wrong reasons: those operators will bail as soon as node stops being âprofitableâ â for any reason, beyond storjâes control. Disk dies, or electricity gets slightly more expensive, etc. Such churn is undesirable from the network perspective, and hence storj shall discourage such behaviour.
The best tool to drive behaviour is proper incentives, including monetary, to make storagenode unprofitable investment. Thatâs the only way to guarantee network stability and longevity.
They should be low enough to discourage opportunistic âtake my kids through collegeâ behavior and high enough to be worth bothering setting up the node, however simple it might be.
Unfortunately, this is very hard to impossible to accomplish with the existing disparity of cost of living across the globe. And you canâ t really have a region specific payouts because that would be ripe for abuse.
Existing underutilized datacenters of course. And individuals who want to receive non-zero amount of money on a monthly basis for doing absolutely nothing. Those individuals who have enough always-on capacity at home. Not many of them in the grand scheme of things, but enough to acomplish the âdistributedâ part of the promise.
Look, one of my nodes here pays $30/month. Running the server costs me $55/month in electricity. I donât run the server because of the node. Server runs anyway. I run node because it offsets my costs. it does not buy me new hard drives or vacation in Paris. If it paid $5/month instead I would had still been doing it: I spend no time maintaining it and it reduces my power bill by 10%. Why would I not?
Thatâs my whole point. Nodes that would be attracted by such payouts are bad nodes, they are joining for the wrong reasons, and therefore are not sustainable nor reliable. Remember the vocal minority of SNOs slamming the door behind themselves few months ago after rate decrease announcement? Someone went onto instigate a strike. Imagine the emotional investment in having free cake.
When node does not pay over the top, then reducing pay further does not cross any thresholds and results in a stable network.
Hope I explained it well enough.
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