Reducing the number of nodes in the US by almost 20% since May

cost of leaving is everywhere big, lot of prices made 2x in last half of a year even. Thats why storj is not main workplace, but additional passive income. My 90 nodes dont need lot of attention, most of problems I know how to debug myself(once learned that’s all) to monitor it takes 5-10 min a day, 5 min- cleaning dust filters once a week. 2-3h once a month to clean inside with blower.

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The Russians already have a fast breeder reactor in commercial operation.

The main advantage of a fast breeder reactor is that it makes it possible to convert spent nuclear fuel into new fuel for nuclear power plants, forming a closed nuclear fuel cycle.

Against this background, all these windmills and solar panels look like Papuan beads, in comparison with an intergalactic ship.

Right up until the moment you have a Fukushima situation, yes.

No problem…
Then we will simply become the same Papuans in beads, because it is safer this way.

Excellent Vadim!

What about equipment depreciation?
Disks are mechanical devices, unless you’re using an ssd.

In this point I agree with you, cost of all my hardware is very big.

Yes, I know, this is why I come with my opinion. Even if I’m a fan of the alternative source of power. But with our current technology this is a best what we can use to generate an energy at the moment.
I know, there are other ways to do it, like a fusion reactor, but it’s still not a production-ready unfortunately.
Yes, both are extremely dangerous (the first one because of a nuclear fuel, the second one… well this a Sun on the Earth), but they are much more efficient and has less waste than the production of solar panels from toxic metals and their processing, not excluding windmills …

By the way:

So, I have a bit of knowledge on this subject. I worked at a coal fired power station for a number of years. I also worked for an electrical distributor in Australia looking after the Solaris systems as well as working for the single largest consumer of electricity on the eastern seaboard.

  1. The amount of energy in one tonne of coal that gets delivered to consumers is less than 30%.
    Part of the reason for this is power stations generally burn low quality coal. At the place I worked they would burn the layer of coal just under the overburden so there was a lot of contamination.

  2. The distribution network design for renewables and fossil fuels are fundamentally different.
    For Fossil fuels the place of generation and the place of consumption are generally distant. This leads to huge losses on the distribution network. (Electrical resistance basically) This is why as part of the shift to renewals the distribution network has to be changed and the point of consumption and generation need to be closer together. Lower losses mean your generation needs are also lower.

  3. Personally, I still think the cleanest form of renewable power is still hydro. Yes, there is a local change to the environment in water flows but if managed it can have other benefits such as flood mitigation. It also has the advantage of being able to be combined with Solar to pump water using excess energy at the peak generation times of the day back upstream as a form of battery storage. I am not a nuclear fan because I do not like the idea of our waste being left to future generations to deal with.

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No, so? As I (and Storj and countless others) said, it is not meant to be a fulltime job as a sysadmin. The hardware is running anyways, the drives exist. So what if it takes 12 months until it pays for my electrical bill?

If Storj was meant to be profitable even when hosted on rented datacenter hardware, then there wouldn’t be the need to run it decentralized in peoples basements.

My 5TB Node is on my 10TB home entertainment server. The alternative to having the Storj node running is to have the home entertainment system running with a half empty disk. I could save energy by spinning down the disk for about 20 hours a day. That would save around 60Wh per day, or 0.021€. So my node became profitable quite quickly after starting, as soon as I earned more than 0.60€ per month. This is the intended business model. Stop complaining that you can’t buy a brand new Dell server with 100TB and a Xeon processor from your Storj income.

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My understanding was the distribution losses were on average less than 10%
That isn’t trivial but far from “huge”. Have I been misled?

(Off topic here, but for clarity I am a massive proponent of investment into research into Nuclear power and deployment of cheaper and safer generations of Nuclear reactors).

Whilst I believe this is Storj’s selling point for Node Operators, I would guess that a significant number of people (myself included) are running nodes in equipment bought specifically for that effect.
I have no major interest in RoI myself, as I just find it a cool hobby, but those running it as a business or expecting an income will more than likely be incurring some CapEx when spooling up new nodes.

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Can you cite anywhere in the forum where I have written such a thing?

Is this a single disk or a RAID/Synoloy disk? The I/O for Storj is significant enough now that I don’t think I’d ever share tasks with Storj and other use cases All my Storj nodes have always use dedicated drives even if RAIDED drives… Now, I have used drives that had bad blocks and were unsuitable for any other purpose. There is even a thread on the forum about me using such a disk. The I/O on that drive was becoming excessive due to the errors and it was impacting another node so eventually I shut it down and removed it. But, the drive was nearly 10 years old so I cannot complain at all. It had well over 70,000 power on hours on it.

I actually buy used drives for my Storj nodes now. My latest was a 6TB drive with 35000 hours on it. But, I paid only $50 USD for it so my chances of a return are good but not guaranteed by any means. It’s a HGST drive though so a good chance it will just keep working.

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The figures I saw for Schneider Electric cited from 2% to 14% for Europe. It varies based on a number of factors including:

  1. Distance
    2.Temperatures
  2. Maintenance.
  3. The general quality of the infrastructure.

For example, I come from North Queensland in Australia. Gladstone is the nearest significant power station. There are power stations further north but they are all very small. This means the transmission line distance to the north of the state could be many hundreds of kilometers. At the same time in summer the temps could be well over 40C. The subsequent losses would be much greater than compared to the south of the state or Victoria where the distances would be far shorter. Still, Gladstone is a 1600MW station so 10% would be 160MW… not a small number in and of itself. (and yes, Gladstone power station was where I worked for a few years - Great place and people.)

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Look at it from the labor perspective.
My hypothesis is that for someone in the USA making a $200k a year they can’t be bothered to run a node at these rates, not that they can’t afford it or it wouldn’t be profitable, or be more expensive than in the Europe.
It is time consuming and they can earn more somewhere else by simply not doing it.
In Europe on the other hand, this small income to already poor income might be a good enough incentive to run a node.

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Very interesting, and hence my use of the word “average”.
And quite right, the absolute value of 160 MW is definitely “non-trivial” but a 10% loss seems acceptable especially bearing in mind that staggering thermodynamic losses incurred earlier in the process anyway…

Yes, that is what I meant about the losses in terms of converting one tonne of coal to electricity. It’s not even 50% for the end user compared to the starting point. A bit if trivia… Gladstone power station has a jet engine they use for situations where there are no turbines running and they need to get one going. It’s used to provide initial energy to kick start the first turbine.

i think those who make 200k a year dons spend time here.

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There are actually recent studies that show that I/O amount does not influence the time to failure much for magnetic drives, I think it was even posted here in the forum a couple of times. Obviously, if you have data you do not want to use, you should have a backup (and a RAID is not a backup). In my case, I only store movies on the hard drive, it would not be too bad if these got lost. I also do store backups of my notebook, but I also have an off-site second backup (on Storj actually) so again, no harm if that backup gets lost.

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I wouldn’t be so sure…

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But it means the drive is doing other things other than what it’s main purpose is.