This is nothing in contrast to 425M tokens though… Even the 240M tokens that aren’t in circulation. Hence why I ask, why doesnt the network operate in a mode where un-used resources are made use of, to maximise payouts.
Longevity? Proper management? Planning?
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Are these STORJ ERC20 tokens mintable?
No. What was generated is the lifetime supply.
You are free to constantly generate paid traffic at any time, my nodes will gladly take the workload.
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Well im now seeing even more flaws in the economics.
Presumably you don’t like that Bitcoin has a limited lifetime supply too?
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Sounds like it’s more of a “flaw” in your understanding of crypto-economics between “utility” tokens and “minable” coins.
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I would say the flaw is unreasonable expectations. The economic model has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies. That’s just a method to implement worldwide payments without having to deal with different banking systems everywhere.
- The customer pays about half the price they would for the big cloud storage platforms
- Storj takes some profit off the top to run the satellites and pay their employees and you know… profit
- The network assumes nodes hosted on consumer level equipment and has additional redundancy built in to cope with untrusted nodes on consumer hardware. This leads to 1TB stored by a consumer taking about 2.7TB of space on nodes.
These three things combined should tell you exactly how much money you should expect to make. Which is quite a bit less than a datacenter would be able to make by offering data storage services directly. If you expect to make money with a dedi setup like you suggested, please read these points again.
Storj is a decentralized storage network, NOT a crypto-mining situation. It was specifically built to use spare resources on systems that were already there and are already online. It’s perfect to make some extra money with spare space on your NAS that would have been online anyway. The only reason the economics work is because those setups don’t require ANY additional costs (except maybe the 5W of extra power a system uses when the disks are constantly spinning and doing stuff). It also actively works against centralization of data to prevent becoming reliable on data centers again.
Payouts and payment is both done in USD value. So the token value only matters to Storj Labs for determining how much runway their reserves offer them. But the end to end economics already work to provide a cheaper solution to customers than the big alternatives, while both Storj Labs and node operators can make a modest profit of it.
The money has to come from somewhere and so does the data. Unlike mining, the money doesn’t come from wild speculation, but from customers who pay for the service provided. If that’s not what you’re looking for, then Storj isn’t for you.
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I think there is fundamental misunderstand or non-understanding of Storj or how businesses work at play here. Say you have a gas turbine power plant, with a maximum power output of 200MW. The grid operator is drawing 83 MW from you. Will you complain to the grid operator and tell him to draw the full 200MW because you’re wasting potential earnings?
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And even more important: if he was a grid operator, would he permanently draw 200MW because he wants the power plant to not miss out on any revenue?
Then again, he already did not quite get my taxi driver comparison pretty much at the start of the thread…
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There is no flaw in my understanding of the economics… 185,000,000 tokens worth $2.39 implies that the storj/tardigrade project is currently publicly worth $442,150,000, this is only based on what is in circulation too (releasing the others would obviously cause a price drop)… That’s far more extreme than the Azure and AWS market value for blob/S3 storage… It’s not actually worth a fraction of that is it?
Stob has had 321.41 of these tokens to date. Which leads me to quote you further: “crypto-economics” is “economics” at the end of the day. This is a major flaw on that basis alone, 321 tokens of 185 million, over a long stretch too!
This concept of STORJ coins is relatively new, its one of very few crypto’s where a realistic service/product is actually involved and some good innovation, good potential, and a competing one with the real world as well… I’m not surprised investment isnt recommended, it does come across as a fun thing to do rather than an actual project to get involved with, because there are no incentives.
You know miners expect to put what we have in to something and make use of it to its max potential.
What other payment models were explored, other economics? Even something as simple as a flat “1 STORJ” per TiB per Month, regardless of the price of STORJ? Wait a minute, the network would grow then?! Then it would shrink!? Then it would grow?! Maybe some controls/rules required at that point?
SON’s would be cashing in their STORJ to buy tardigrade storage and using it up to cause the network to grow, causing an influx on the network, miners coming and going… You probably get what I’m saying… Was this ever considered or simulated?
I see so its more or less a 3:1 ratio.
It’s not money though is it, it’s ERC20 tokens, which were generated in a few clicks…
I probably would insist they take more from me so i could get more earnings… Yeah definitely.
The financial model that was considered and is used is prices being half of what the other large providers like AWS have. These companies use fiat for payments, as they should, cryptocurrencies are very volatile comparatively, as does Storj from customer’s perspective. Storj does use a flat price of $10 per terabytemonth and $45 per terabyte of download traffic. And it IS regardless of the price of Storj.
It absolutely does not. These are not shares. The token value implies the value of the token only, not of the project or company.
For all intents and purposes it is fiat money. Customers pay dollar amounts, Storj Labs takes a cut in dollar amounts and SNOs get paid in dollar amounts. For purposes of the economic model the tokens might as well not be there. As for generating. These tokens were created all at once when the contract was created. They aren’t being generated anymore. But since the token value changes don’t cause price increases or decreases for the product, it’s value is also not that much tied to the product. And this is a good thing. Otherwise the product would just have become a lot more expensive with the recent price increases.
Yeah good luck with that… I don’t think forcing people to buy your product is usually very successful.
You would probably very reasonably get the response that you shouldn’t have created capacity you knew there was no demand for.
What is your argument for the “SNO’s are being kicked about” part? It takes about a year to a year and a half to earn back the investment in an HDD that would usually last 5+ years. So you can make a decent profit on any hardware you can provide to Storj (as long as you make an effort to match it to realistic demand). If you were expecting a get rich quick scheme, I think the problem is not how Storj rewards SNO’s, but a matter of unrealistic expectations. Your service just isn’t worth as much as you think.
If you don’t think there is currently enough data coming in… then don’t be a SNO. Enough people make that decision and there are fewer nodes and more data per node. This will balance itself out until there are just enough SNOs happy enough with the amount of data they get. Which means it by definition will never become extremely lucrative to invest. Because you are competing against people who use existing equipment that is already online. So with no costs at all, I’ll take any income I can get. My standards will be quite a bit lower and I won’t be alone. So adjust your expectations accordingly.
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Forget the USD and value of STORJ, I’m talking about what would be seen as an (unconverted) stock dividend… Was this model ever explored or considered?
"These are not shares. The token value implies the value of the token only, not of the project or company."
They are tradeable, and what is in cirulation is tradeable, the volume is a result of the business plan and solely the responsibility of STORJ… I said “publicly worth” and it is a representation of value. If someone with a big stake sold millions of tokens on the market, the price would plunder to near-nothing… Isn’t that quite worrying? They would eventually get bought up though, if anyone was interested…
"What is your argument for the “SNO’s are being kicked about” part?"
The rewards system is based on converted tokens… Customers at tardigrade are paying a flat rate USD, the service usage is based on USD, then a one-way conversion to STORJ is happening based on USD market rates and then the SNO’s are being pretty much fed USD. From there, there is a 50/50 chance things could get better or worse for token holders, the price of STORJ could get higher or lower based on market activity.
FileCoin seems to be having slightly more complex economic-idea issues too, from what i have read about it, but slightly dissimilar to this, miners are moaning. For context shall we refer to SNO’s as farmers/harvesters from now on? So as not to trigger people?
"If you don’t think there is currently enough data coming in… then don’t be a SNO."
If another model was in place, there would be more than enough data coming in… Because there would be the potential for SNO’s to make the network grow.
Imagine from day one, 1 STORJ per TiB (or some other “proof of whatever” unit), or 10 STORJ per GiB, and it stays like that with perhaps some stabilising tweaks, such as a variation in this value based on perhaps market rates and network activity. Likening this to “difficulty” variances?
unrealistic expectations
This is the buzzword? It’s more unfair than unrealistic.
At best the represent the value of the utility of that token. Definitely not of the project. At worst (and more realistically) the represent speculative value to investors in the token. This is so far removed from the value of the project that this
is simply a false statement. That’s what the token speculation and utility is worth and says nothing about what the project is worth.
Not really… I mean not more worrying than any other tradeable asset. Storj Labs has been a pretty good steward of the token. Their reserves are in rolling lockups that can be viewed on the blockchain. They have quarterly token reports to inform the community of any changes that may be upcoming. Of course they can’t control what other large token holders will do… but that’s the same with any token.
More importantly, for the business this really doesn’t matter. If you sell your income when you get it, you’re guaranteed to get the USD amount you were owed. So you can take on as little or as much token risk as you want as both a customer or SNO.
From there it is also entirely up to you whether you want to keep the tokens or trade them. I don’t see the problem.
The reason people keep redirecting the terminology is not because we have our own word, it’s because being a SNO is something completely different from being a miner. Storj is NOT a “proof of whatever” system. It’s providing a service to customers who need storage space. It works on supply and demand. If there are no customers who want to store data, there is no data to store. Simple as that.
You really need to get your head out of that entire miner headset and not just swap out terminology. This network works nothing like you are describing. What you are describing is how burstcoin works. That uses a Proof of Capacity system. But since it doesn’t really provide any value to end consumers, it’s pretty much impossible to make decent money there. Give it a try though if you believe that business model is better. But that’s not what Storj is about.
Spoiler alert: Last I checked burstcoin mining made less than $0.25 per TB per month and dropping…
It seems to fit. I pointed out exactly in my previous post how SNOs get fair compensation for the service they provide. Unless you counter that with some actual arguments, I’m going to stand by my previous statements and leave it at that.
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If you are worried about that, you can convert your tokens the moment you receive them to something that seems less worrying to you.
Actually SNOs have been referred to as “farmers” in earlier stages of the project 
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