I’m both a Storj node operator and a Storj user, and I’ve always appreciated the vision behind the project. However, over the past months I’ve become increasingly concerned about whether it still makes sense to continue participating, and I’d like to share my experience in a constructive way.
On the storage side, I currently store around 1.35 TB of data, which expands to about 2.16 TB on Storj due to the architecture. That part is understandable but still overhead I pay for. What’s more difficult is that, as a node operator, I’ve had hundreds of gigabytes of unused space sitting idle on both of my nodes for a couple of months now. This is in addition to the Trash folder, which also occupies space at my expense. All of this capacity is reserved for Storj, meaning I can’t use it for anything else — similar to owning a car that still costs money even when it’s not being driven.
At the same time, the value of STORJ tokens keeps dropping, and the dollar‑to‑euro conversion has been steadily working against me. The combined effect is that the economics have become less and less attractive, even though I’m providing reliable storage and keeping significant resources available.
I fully understand that Storj cannot influence the USD/EUR exchange rate. But some of the other factors — such as how much space sits unused, how Trash is handled, or how operator incentives evolve — are within the project’s control. I’m hoping to understand whether improvements or adjustments are planned, because in the current state it’s becoming difficult to justify continuing as a node operator.
I’m sharing this not to complain, but because I care about the ecosystem and want to see it succeed. I’d appreciate any insight into whether these issues are being addressed or if changes are expected in the near future.
Thanks for reading, and I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
The new owners of Storj (or new CEO) probably aren’t looking for ways to pay SNOs more. There’s so much extra capacity I’m kinda expecting a pay cut.
I don’t know if it’s possible with your setup: but it may only make sense to offer spare space (that another use/application is already paying for). Basically don’t keep anything online just-for-Storj. If not… you can probably make more offloading medium/large nodes to another SNO (than a graceful exit), but that’s up to you. Some people do decide to just turn things off.
Then stop nodes. Running nodes should not cost anything. Nodes shall not keep your hardware online. It’s contradicts core idea of this project. So you are getting money for free, for capacity that will otherwise go to waste.
The only choice here is whether or not get free money from storj, that for some reason pay a lot for not much.
There is an ongoing automatic payout reduction going on (called inflation) but I hope actual rate reduction should come. Throwing that much money at SNO makes no sense when they proved time and again that storj overpays by staying in spite of slow growth and surplus of nodes. I heard select network get paid much less.
You mean for you? Or for storj? Both are correct: payout shall be low enough to avoid operator churn and as a company yes, payments to vendors shall not be large portion of revenue
You should be selling the instance the tokens drop in your wallet. Otherwise you have effectively bought your payout in STORJ tokens and are speculating on the price.
Unfortunately ingress is the one thing they have control over and it’s really up to the company as a whole to incentivize more users to join the public network. Growth comes and goes, but over time your node should stabilize around maybe 8TB or so after a couple of years.
For trash if you have hashstore you can control the aggressiveness of the compaction. For piecestore there are no tuning parameters for overhead. For 2TB/mo is it really worth any more hassle than a couple of minutes checking on your node every once in a awhile? For small hosts you should really be thinking of nodes as a way to offset your homelab electricity prices.
It isn’t worth running a storagenode if you have a job in a developed country.
All that effort you put in, all that brainspace you use to keep it running, having to walk round that box that’s running all day.
All that earns you about $100 and you have feck about with crypto.
Unless you think this stuff is fun, like I did. Except the DDNS; That was always a pita
To make more cash you have to “cheat” and run a bunch of nodes on different IP spaces
I believe too many SNOs came with a mining
mind set, expecting high returns directly or by hodling and riding with the bulls. After realising that both are false assumptions, they start to share their dissapointment in the project.
Is it though? I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a lunch burrito here costs $15, houses 3M+ if you accept shitty location, long commute, at $6/gallon gas prices, and electricity is close to $0.50/kwh, and yet, I’m running storage nodes, because they offset my electricity costs. I would still be running them if they were paying 1/10 of the current rate. Why? Because they don’t cost me anything. I get free money. I did not do anything specific to storj, that I would not have done without storj.
Actually, no, you are right, I had to drag the 1099-MISC from storj into TurboTax to report the income… It did cost me 20 seconds of my time dealing with paperwork.
Have you considered installing a small solar installation on your balcony. I have about 500W of solarpower mounted there. They get plugged into a power outlet like any other device with a special converter that outputs the solarpower on top of the signal from the grid. So it stays in sync with the grid. Not sure if they are compatible with the US grid but by now I would expect that there are some on the market that are compatible. You just need to find them. Anyway it works really great in combination with a storage node that consumes power all day. In my case the installation will pay for itself after about 5 years.
The rest about presidents having mental meltdowns over windmills I will keep for myself
