Under normal circumstances it seems impossible to receive the full held amount.
After 15 month 50% is paid but the remaining 50% is reserved for GE only.
So what does it mean for a reliable operator? A reliable operator will manage to hold all data, never receive a crash and therfor never sees the held amount paid to him.
An unreliable operator will experience a crash, any drive will fail at some point. So the held amount is gone.
Only operator who chooses to leave the network at some point will receive their held amount back.
I don understand this is an incentive to leave the network in a defined way, but it is also an incentive to leave the network after 15 months. Because either your drive crashes and you loose held amount or your node runs reliable forever and you never see the held amount.
I challenge you to do that calculation. Keep in mind you will lose all data and reputation and need to start over with an unvetted node. With reasonably sized nodes the monthly income is higher than the remaining held back amount.
Are you going to give up a node that make $80+ a month to get back $44,93? Makes very little sense to me.
Edit: Just to preempt some comments, in recent months ingress has been a lot lower, so this is not necessarily representative for current traffic. If that remains I will update the estimator, but that will lower both held amount as well as monthly income and the calculation would lead to the same conclusion.
This is the question. It depends on how much money is held back and the risk of the node.
If I believe my node will go down any way (any disk will fail at some point) then my $80 income would come to an end as well.
Normally I would agree with you that you would keep running your node until it fails, (unless your held amount is huge) which means the held back amount is not really held back, it is to be written off.
If your node will survive for another month it will be worth it. If you know for sure your node will fail before then, I assure you you won’t be able to run a successful graceful exit either.
So yes, I don’t count on ever getting my held amount back unless a satellite shuts down, like what happened with the stefanbenten satellite. But I also don’t care as it’s negligible compared to the monthly income it generates.
You have to remember that a GE on a 10TB node will likely take 2 month at 2MB/s upload speed. So if your drive starts failing, it seems unlikely that you will be able to finish GE.
Combining these three thoughts gives a probable sweet spot between node size and GE time which would result in running multiple nodes in staggered start-up with one node always starting and one node always in GE mode… along with one node full, one node half full, and one node just out of vetting…
No, the “sneakiest” way is to run one big node and a new small node limited to 500GB on each drive. When one drive dies, you move the small node from the other drive and have a possibly 9 month old node with almost no held amount. Then you start a new small node again.
Then you have no need to do GE ever because it is simply not worth it for 5$ held amount. I have a small 500GB node in month 6 with $1.44 held amount.
Sure isn’t what STORJlabs had in mind when they implemented the held amount but this way you can keep it to a minimum. Not the main reason I keep my small node but certainly one reason.
The Held back amount is for paying the repair Traffic if a node fails. Of course there are some mechanics which can reduce the risk of losing data due a broken disk like raid or similar. It depends on what you preferrer:
Parity over max Disk space or vice versa. (Its your choice)
I think the Solution provided by Storj is pretty fair. In other Storagerental services like SIA you have to put an collateral upfront in case your node goes down, which means you need to spend money before you can even contribute, which is much better solved in storj.
No. the small node is just your backup. You run one big node and if the drive fails, you copy the small node from the other drive and let it get big while creating a new small node as a backup on the other drive (and once that one is vetted another small node as a backup on the new drive).
That way with 2 drives you always have 2 big nodes and 2 small backup nodes you can copy to a new drive.
yeah I can’t say much about that because I actually run a raidz1 with ssd cache on 3 white label WD Ultrastar. They don’t care about the load but I don’t know how some lower quality single drives handle it.
However, an additional small node with 500GB shouldn’t cause much strain on the drive.
Sure you can try to be sneaky and get as low a held amount as possible. But honestly, I don’t think Storj Labs cares. If you go through so much trouble to limit held amount you’re also likely someone who puts a lot of effort into running stable nodes. Which is a net positive anyway. The thing is, your first node kind of by definition has to collect a fair amount of held amount, since you don’t want to limit it. So you’re already talking about limiting held amount after the first failure. Meaning you have a fail over plan already. I think Storj Labs would gladly give up some held amount in trade for a SNO who’s prepared for such scenarios. The held amount incentive is mostly just to prevent people from starting and quitting in short succession. Any plan that involves waiting until GE is possible and then exiting is also just fine by Storj Labs as most of that transfer takes place between nodes and cost of GE is very limited.
So optimize where you can, you’ll find that the optimal solution for SNOs is also a pretty damn good situation to be in for Storj Labs.
How to make hundreds of dollars per month on Storj…
Run 40x1GB for 10 months and then deploy them at full speed, full size.
Process requires high speed bandwidth, and dynamic allocation of drive space and network resources… after vetting is complete on node n size is set to 0GB and node n+1 is set from 0 GB to 1 GB.
Of course, it’s a little joke. Typical wording of those “I made $3500 in these simple steps” spam posts… Cut the number of node starts to 4… instead of the non-serious 40…
IPv4 /24 limitations will start to be a problem beyond a handful of nodes.
I think limiting the held back amount will probably not work out economically versus simply running nodes in a more linear succession with GE in the 16th month. If one is already running ZFS, then nodes will reach the 16th month anyway.
I see no harm in having a 2nd node with only 500GB on a big drive.
yes with raidz1 on 3 disks I will probably never need a backup node because the array shouldn’t die but I moved from 3 smaller single drives to one big raidz1 so I kept all 3 nodes
But when I was running on 3 drives I was thinking about the best way to keep the held amount low and always have a backup node so I wouldn’t need to go through the vetting again. and this is what I came up with.
This would result in all nodes that can receive data being in vetting (and sharing traffic). Vetting will take ages and the node will get very little data. Of course this limits the build up of held amount, but it also limits your income significantly. (more than you will ever gain in held amount)
I really don’t see any of these methods holding up. Also… who wants to go through this trouble really?
I’m not so sure. For every node you exit you have a new node for which data is being held back again. You just trade in a static held amount for a rolling held amount and a ton of work to manage it all.
Perhaps the total held amount can be made slightly lower that way, but I don’t see that being worth it. Especially since you’re constantly throwing away collected data that needs to be gathered back again. I think you’d lose money with any such solution.
Maybe that would be true considering the paid out value in USD. However, since we are paid in STORJ which changes in value over time, it may be possible to time GE to pay out maximal STORJ… and then cash it in for maximal USD value on one’s own timeline.
I had big plans this year for several experiments. But I’m currently typing away during snack time after just finishing teaching area and perimeter… moving on to vocabulary and spelling in 10 minutes. Hoping that my 2nd and 3rd grader are ahead rather than behind in education…
