UPS is not a requirement only if your electricity supply is very reliable. Discounting data corruption on unsafe shutdown (possible, but not very likely), being offline for x hours a month may get you suspended (no traffic for a while) or disqualified (escrow percentage starts over).
Now, if you are already running the server etc, so your electricity usage is the same anyway, yes, running a node can be regarded as profitable if you do not count the effort put into setting it up and maintaining it.
However, let’s just hope that there is enough egress traffic for everyone.
So you are using your own situation to justify your own argument? A better way to respond would have been to ask me about my circumstances to probe me wrong. I understand that a large portion of users here believe that electricity and hardware costs are the same across the world, but its not.
No I don’t host a 3TB node, did I say that?
No I don’t host a PI, did I say that?
No my electricity cost is not in USD (Or any other dollar currency), did I say that?
Your solution to my problem is to invest MORE to get even LESS out of this. Good math bro!!!
My node consumes about $8 month in power., and gives me revenue in about $1-2, so I’m losing $6 today. That does not account for ANY hardware costs, as I have them anyways. It does not account the time I have invested into the design of my node, the setup, the performance tests, networking setup, monitoring, log shipment etc.
Currently I’m getting 256GB of data each day so obviously I’m doing something right, or that the formula is broken, for egress the formula is broken for sure
Id like to know why your paying 8 dollars a month with just power for your node.
What is your rate of elect? here in canada its 10cents per kwh.
I also get paid just like you do in USD so I convert to CAD which is much higher then I would expect to get. I made last month 109 dollars USD which converts to 154 CAD, cost of my node probably around 3 dollars a month to run Maybe a little more…This is all profit for me I even expanded and used the money to buy a hard drive.
I’m not going to respond to any of your posts anymore. Your attitude in this forum is getting increasingly ridiculous and toxic.
Have a nice day and good luck with storj.
Just try to live up to your own post and the expectations you have on others.
Hey all – Im Jocelyn, the community team manager. I’m noticing that some of the conversation Im seeing here is bubbling up a bit hot. We generally try here to stick to an ethos of “moderate lightly” and with reasonable transparence.
I love that people have strong opinions, and feel confident to debate freely, and lets also always be sure to keep a good spirit while doing so. We’re living through some incredibly weird times right now and you never know whats going on in the life of the people on the other side of the keyboard
This comment isnt targeted toward any particular individual – if that were the case I would likely be reaching out via DM… Its just something for all of us to remember (including me on days when I havent got milk to put in my coffee)
thank you all for being part of these big conversations. Especially now, having these kinds of intelligent and rational conversations is very enlivening & inspiring to many of us in a time when it seems the world is zigging when it should zag, and vice versa!!
I haven’t had my coffee yet either this morning, but despite that I’m actually in good spirits. I would like to say that in general I’m very happy to see this is a community in which people rarely debate in bad faith. Generally people here aren’t out to annoy someone else, but rather they genuinely respond to what is posted. Now that translation to text can still miss some nuance and tone, which is why I would really encourage everyone to try some charitable reading of what is posted.
I like to stick with not using names, but I am going to use an example.
I’m still not counting the “cold storage” as its not enough to make any node profitable
This line inspired a counterpoint, which is most likely because of the word “any”. Generalizations are usually not very helpful because something is rarely true for everyone.
The response used some generalizations as well and ended with ‘QED’, which may seem like someone is just saying you’re doing it wrong.
A bit of charitable reading would make both of these comments fine. Maybe “any” didn’t literally mean any and just that this persons node is not profitable with storage alone. Maybe the response wasn’t trying to be high brow and pointing out that someone is doing it wrong, but rather just showing another option. I promise you nobody is just trying to piss you off. I’ve been around here long enough to know that is not the tone of conversation.
Nobody’s perfect, we all fall into this trap from time to time.
So assume good intentions and let’s get back to it.
@BrightSilence I think we have something in common were not here solely to make money, more to be apart of something bigger then yourself, Helping see a project mature and you become apart of it.
Some are here for the purpose of making money and that is ok there just going to be disappointed. When it comes to spending or making money people become more aggressive when they have very high expectations when they see the profit calculator then reality sets in that there probably not going to make that much ever.
When I first saw V2 I didn’t have the hardware I have today so I could only put minimal effort to it because I had limited resources, Now when V3 came out I was ready to be apart of the project with little to no expectations of making money, When I first saw my 5cents on my first payment for storj it didnt really effect me at all I see it as a movement in the right direction that I actually helped in someway shape of form.
Now today I see that I can put a little more effort in helping storj network by expanding my hardware with little to no cost to me, so thats what I do, But the people who went out to buy expensive hardware or rented from datacenters, or even people who have expensive hardware already and then run storj on it expecting storj to pay for the hardware there internet there power costs, Obviously this is putting high expectations into the “IDEA” that your going to be making big bucks because wow your hardware is so high end and your going to get 100PB of data in 1month.
I did buy some hardware for v2 and IIRC I got quite a few tokens. If I sold the tokens back then it would have been nice.
The reason I bought the hardware is that, for me, there is a lower limit of earnings where the effort is no longer worth it. Let’s say that I have a bitcoin miner. If I turn it on, it would consume 10EUR worth of electricity per month, but would generate 11EUR worth of bitcoin. For me, the 1EUR/month is not worth the effort of keeping the miner running, looking for different coins to mine with it, selling the coins etc. OTOH, if I had 1000 such miners, then the combined profit of 1000EUR/month would definitely be worth it.
Same here - if I grab a drive that I have lying around, stick it into some old PC that I have and run a node on that it may not be worth it for the effort. I actually did that for v2 as running more nodes meant more money and the nodes could be offline etc. Not so much with v3.
That’s why I bought some hardware. If I get lucky, this will be worth my effort and if not, well, I guess I’ll have to find some other use for the hardware.
I run a pretty significant amount of total hardware and with both egress and storage payouts I am making enough to cover power and almost half my internet costs with my oldest node being a few days over a year old at this point. Is it paying for the hardware itself yet that was already bought for V2 and other projects? Nope. But it is covering a significant amount of my operational costs and there is still lots of room to grow with already in place storage and servers.
V2 paid for a large chunk of my infrastructure that exists, which is something that new users have to keep in mind when looking at build outs like mine with a number of servers and high amounts of TB of storage from long term users. I started in 2017 with a couple of repurposed NUCs and some external HDDs that I got on sale and grew it over the course of 2017 and 2018. People just starting out will have to keep that in mind is that the long term or large scale people will probably have stuff in place from V2 or other stuff like Burst mining. If people are buying significant hardware for this up front, definitely don’t. Be patient. Get hardware when it is on sale and/or buy used to expand. Keep your node in a reliable state and keep operational costs low. With low power hardware, a lower power UPS will keep everything going through power outages at a fairly low cost, make sure to put your modem on the UPS as well.
I wish everyone understood this fact, Everyone expects there nodes to be 100% all the time, and start making profits soon as they start up there nodes. “We didnt fly to the moon overnight”
It’s a good point and there should be room for both. While you’re never going to get filthy rich you can make money. But expectations can definitely mess with things. Which is why I kept hammering the point that the earnings estimator needs to change.
As for upfront cost. I’m quite risk averse so I wasn’t willing to spend anything beforehand. I got into V2 too late to make actual money. Kind of went with the set it and forget it approach. At the time I liked the idea but I didn’t yet particularly like the implementation. But I was running it on a NAS that was online anyway so I figured I might as well make a few bucks. I wouldn’t have bought any hardware for it back then though. V3 changed that. The approach is clever, the white paper is impressive and the tech can really scale. Still when I started I used the same hardware. It was only when Storj could pay for my upgrades that I started spending some money on it. My array is currently expending to use an additional 16TB disk that I literally used my storj earnings to buy. Traded them for Bitcoin and paid for the HDD with that. I might be willing to spend some of my own money now too. So yeah, I got into V3 because I liked the idea, then started to love the approach and then came the money. It won’t be like that for everyone.
Test data and test loads is very different than what loads would actually look like if Tardigrade had a lot of customers (tens of thousands etc). While the actions of a single customer cannot really be predicted with any certainty, the average actions of a lot of customers can be predicted based on past loads. While a single customer can decide to upload 1TB to the network today (my node would probably get a few GB of that), then download and delete it the next day, it is extremely unlikely that 10000 or more customers would coordinate their efforts and each upload 1TB at the same time, then download and delete it. Possible, but extremely unlikely.
Which means that by looking at current traffic I could plan to expand the node etc.
Storj tests behave like a single huge client (with petabytes of data) and is impossible to plan around. Today it’s 30M ingress and I know when I will need to expand the node however, it may be that as soon as I do that the data from the old satellite gets deleted and the 30M ingress stop leaving me with a lot of free space.
I’ll provide an example from an ISP side (as I have more experience there). The usage pattern of a single customer cannot really be predicted - I do not know when he decides to watch a YouTube video or run a Storj node. However the aggregated load on the uplink follows a very clear pattern that has a peak and you can see if the peak get higher and higher over time. When it approaches the capacity of the channel it is time for an upgrade. The more customers there are the clearer the pattern is because the influence of a single customer is lower.
I think this is why people are asking about Storj intentions with the test data. If it was 10000 separate customers then there would be no need to ask for intentions of every single customer - the averages and trends would show what to do.
Personally… I’m hoping for a massive month of downloading all the data on my node… followed by massive deletion of all data… and then a slow ingress over the next few months with generous downloading of the newer data alongside.
This way I can rebaseline my node storage usage without messing up my node reputation or adding extra allocation to the node.
But, I somehow don’t think that’s going to happen.
Yeah, I really doubt that would happen. I would like to know if/when the old satellite data is going to be deleted (more specifically - before I run out of space and have to expand the array or right after I do that) and/or how much more data is going to be uploaded using the new satellite.
I would be interested to know more about the marketing effort. Is there a team (how many people) aggressively courting big data customers? Which or which industries? Who is biting? What do onboarding projection look like? Etc., etc.
As for being a SNO, I will continue to sit on my Storj until the price is such that the effort expended is proved worthwhile. I am giving it a few years. I’ve got grid-tied solar and a great overnight discount, so my costs are not much to run an otherwise obsolete server with old drives. I would love to scale up to several PBs, but won’t invest in new equipment until/unless Storj hits at least $1, or so. If it never does, then at least I played to win.
