According to Storj, the profitability was not good.
profitability forced payments to be lowered.
thanks storj,
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It’s does GPU rentals… but close. Your Valdi search seems to have missed the company announcement, … and the exact same link from two days ago. 
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the truth is that @luco_mtb is absolutely right, it is not right to pay less to the node operators because the business is not profitable and with the money saved to go shopping.
It is a lack of respect, many node operators have trusted in the project and have invested a lot of resources.
Storj should go back to the previous payments, because they do have money and they have been saying for a long time that new clients are going to come in.
It really pisses me off
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price was determine by the market and not storj, you should compare price with other vendor before venting…
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You know the math right? If we increase the payout rates to the old values how exactly are we going to run this buisness? Increase customer pricing? By how much? How do we prevent the customers from switching to one of the other vendors? Please go on and explain your buisness plan to us.
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People are fierce when it come to money…
But they don’t understand what need to be done when it come to business, you should be thankful because StorJ lend their marketing power to you. It take up north 40% revenue just go to sale/marketing department - and without economy of scale, you can’t land a contract with business customer.
Do the math and you will see who is getting a bargain here…
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I am not here to make a business plan for anyone, but I have seen what Storj has done.
1.- Say that the business is not profitable and consequently lower the payments to the node operators.
2.- once the payments are adjusted… we are going to buy a company of what is currently fashionable (AI), yes… they have some storage… but it is not the focus of that company. I don’t think the operation has been a bargain… when looking at Valdi’s website, it is clear that they are serious about it. They have datacenter gpu’s.
It’s not right to belittle the node operators that hold some of the business data.
Just my opinion.
Wait what? First you are requesting a higher payout rate with no data to back it up? And you expect upper management to just trust your word?
Common lets get a bit more serious in here. You can’t just make up some random numbers and expect that a magic unicorn to make this possible. That is not how a business is operated.
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I will give you an example that even a 10 year old child could understand:
Some time ago, I worked at a small company where the atmosphere was really good. One day, the boss gathered all the employees and announced that the business was not doing well, asking everyone to make an effort. For the common good, everyone agreed to reduce their salaries.
However, a month later, the owner of the company arrived at work driving a new Ferrari, the most expensive one. This made many employees, especially those who earned less and had accepted the pay cut in good faith, very angry.
Although it could be a misunderstanding and the Ferrari might not really belong to the owner, these are things to avoid when asking people to make sacrifices.
In our case, Storj asked the node operators to make an effort and significantly reduced their earnings. These operators trusted the project. And now, Storj has spent money buying another company that, at first glance, does not seem related to storage.
I just hope that Storj remembers all those who trusted them and gives a real boost to the node operators, regardless of size, from those with a Raspberry Pi with a disk at their grandmother’s house to those with several racks full of disks.
It has been shown that Storj has plenty of resources.
I hope this makes my opinion clear.
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I don’t think this is the same thing. Storj purchased this company to expand revenue opportunities. By generating additional revenue, Storj can hopefully become profitable and be here long term.
Giving SNO’s more money than they take in would not do that. It would hasten the company to close down.
This isn’t a company blowing momey on fast cars. This was a strategic investment. The people making these decisions understand the pros and cons of the purchase. They saw more pros than cons for the future longevity and success of the company.
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Lets just hope there will be customers for this AI venture.
Valdi looks to be, at least from the listed partners, mainly focused on an academic sector, such as renting resources to academia for research purposes.
But this I think can be very easily stolen for example by the MS, as I assume as in corps, so in academia there was/is/will be a push to move from on-prem hardware and software to a full cloud solution. And in this sector, they are for sure already using some of the MS products, which would make choosing the same corp for AI a logical choice. And then there will be kickbacks for choosing the right company to go with.
And lastly, if there would be some serious customer willing to rent a compute, some lonely data center ops with 8 GPUs probably can’t compete with institutions that have built whole data centers just for the AI and are eager to lend it out, so the EOY numbers will look better than the last year ones.
Which leaves us with SOHO customers, but how many of those in a need of an AI compute are there?
It is early days for AI and a lot can change very quickly with it. Right now a lot of companies are trying to figure out where large language models fit in with their business. Cost is certainly going to be a major factor on whether many of them choose to employ it or not. Valdi provides a.cost effective way to borrow hardware without making an infrastructure commitment. A large company like Amazon or Microsoft could offer the same but would it be price competitive? I guess we will wait and see…
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In case you haven’t been a part of one of these transactions before, it’s worth pointing out that rarely is an acquisition an “all cash” deal. If Google acquires a company for “$30 million”, it is saying that it valued the company at $30 million, and then traded things with the company (such as shares of Google, etc, that may not even come out of Google’s balance sheet) that the acquired company also valued at $30 million. In some acquisitions, cash doesn’t even change hands!
Storj is building a successful business. That requires making sure we don’t lose more money than we earn (which we were doing with old SNO rates), and making sure we have good sources of revenue. I get that the optics of this aren’t pleasing (e.g., “Storj is paying less to SNOs and is now buying companies!”), but these are genuinely not necessarily related things.
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Think about this like with shopping. You want to go to the mall that has all the shops You need in one place, over the one, which doesn’t. Customers are more likely to chose a storage service, which has other services too.
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This is inaccurate. We are going to silence your account for a while as you seem to resort to posting these untruths after similar warnings from the admins. Further posts around these and other unfounded claims about the company will result in your account being banned.
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I understand his words as this:
So far we have been told there are multi-petabyte customers in the sales pipeline but at least it appears no contract signed yet.:
A large portion of the data stored in the past was free trial data customers did not pay Storj for:
And recently we see huge amounts of test data Storj does not get paid for either.
So from that view I think the quote you have picked is not totally inaccurate.
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While I appreciate your attempt at rewording what he wrote. He states the only real data we have had was unpaid data. This is not true, and you rewording it does not make it true.
The company does not announce when it has or hasn’t signed customers to contracts, unless it makes sense for the business to do so. Historically, it has not and I would expect that to continue.
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Also, for everyone’s general knowledge, we admins do not take such steps as silencing users and banning users lightly. We discuss internally with each other as well as other staff members the various situations and discussions that happen here. And we lean heavily towards allowing users to speak freely, and at times vent their frustrations and speak their mind. However, we have a code of conduct and we do draw the line on topics where such statements as the above are not based in fact. We provide multiple warnings and try to address the issue and move forward but repeated incidents resulted, in this case, with us having the user take a break for a while.
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Well, I am just saying that my understanding of his words is a bit different. Like when he literally has written:
which for me is different to
But of course I can be wrong. When he has been unsilenced he can clarify if feels like it.
I hope it makes sense for the clients to come.
I don’t and don’t have questioned that. It was about the quote only that did not sound exceptionally bad to me.
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Perhaps, but they used language with accusatory, distorting intent. What’s wrong with being constructive rather than just attacking?
And they can! I liked much of their posts where they provide a good feedback about nodes and used hardware and specialized hardware/software solutions.
But when they are talking about a company they become a very toxic, I’m sorry.
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