@GreenGrinch I actually agree with your core point here: just cutting SNO payouts and hoping for “8× usage” is not a realistic strategy. Price alone won’t magically fix the demand side, especially in markets where Backblaze, Cloudflare and even cheap VPS storage are already well-established and often “good enough”.
That’s exactly why I’m so sceptical when people propose “just halve payouts and usage will go 8×”. From the SNO side it’s a double risk: we take the hit on margins now, and there is no guarantee that the expected growth will ever materialise – especially when Storj is still struggling to prove clear advantages in many mainstream use cases.
To give a concrete example: I first really looked into Storj when I was searching for a CDN solution for a larger web project. On paper, decentralized storage sounded interesting, but in practice it became clear that Storj was not the right fit: there was no simple drop-in integration with the CMS I was using, no mature plugins, and it would have required me to re-implement big parts of the media/storage pipeline just to test it. In the end I went with a more traditional CDN, simply because it integrated in an afternoon instead of becoming a multi-week side project. It was nothing about the price.
If Storj wants a “cold tier” or cheaper offers, this has to be solved on the product / customer side (positioning, reliability, integrations, enterprise deals, etc.), not by squeezing the only group that actually provides the storage and egress capacity.