@Roxor I published my opinion about Inveniam now and I think I also answered indirectly to your thoughts about it:
@alpharabbit For a single home node you are right – egress payments are usually not the main factor. But for larger setups the picture changes completely.
If egress is not paid or is paid significantly less than today, many people (including myself) would start to cut upload speed for their nodes. A part of my nodes (customer server nodes – difficult and irrelevant to explain in detail here) are on connections where I pay around 1.00€ for each additional TB of upload. From 2 TB uploaded (including cancelled and zombie uploads) Storj will pay roughly 1.50 USD in egress.
Many nodes in the network run on hosting servers or other metered connections, not on “free” home broadband. Those operators would do exactly the same as I would: protect their most expensive resource – upstream bandwidth. Storj charges customers a lot for egress traffic, and that’s fine. But there is no need to cut from the SNO side who are literally providing that egress capacity and keeping the system alive.
A “cold” storage tier without egress payout sounds attractive from the customer point of view, but it creates very bad incentives on the node side: the people with the most capacity and the most professional setups are also those who pay the most for upload. If you tell them “storage only gets paid, egress is free”, they will understandably throttle or deprioritize that traffic. That’s the exact opposite of what Storj is trying to sell right now (fast, reliable, premium performance, not just cheapest possible cold storage).
@andrew2.hart Yes, the acquisition happened – Storj agreed to be acquired by Inveniam, Storj will continue as a subsidiary and STORJ remains part of the ecosystem. So far all official communication says: node payments stay as they are, no changes to contracts or pricing, and STORJ keeps its current role.
That’s exactly why I see another payout cut as much more than “just business”. Storj has repeatedly framed the previous reductions as necessary steps to reach a sustainable long-term model and explicitly wrote that they “do not anticipate further payout rate adjustments for the foreseeable future.” You can’t tell node operators “this is what we need to be sustainable long term” and then keep coming back to the same lever every time something gets tight. At some point that’s not just an economic decision any more, it becomes a trust problem.
About your “halve storage payout but 8× usage” scenario: I understand that logic on a single-node level – I would also rather have a lot of real usage at a slightly lower per-TB rate than almost no usage at a higher rate. But that only works if the total economics line up for both sides:
- Storj needs enough margin to be sustainable.
- SNOs need enough margin per TB and per TB egress to keep disks spinning and bandwidth open long term.
If Storj introduce a lower-price “cold” tier, that can be fine – but they can do it by adjusting customer pricing and product tiers, not by quietly eating further into the only two levers SNOs have (storage and egress payout). Otherwise they risk not only nodes going offline but also destroying exactly the community marketing engine that brought them so much supply in the first place.