Hello, I wanted to ask what you are doing with your tokens. Storj is currently in a free fall.
Tokens work the same for payouts no matter what their price is: you donāt have to do anything special.
So do the same thing as every-other-month-since-Storj-launched: sell them 10min after they hit your wallet. 5min is better if you can swing itā¦ make it a gameā¦ see how quickly you can get rid of them 
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Yeah looking at a chart it looks like the storj coin price has generally gone in a downward direction over the years.
Definitely best to sell it after you are paid with it.
(and if you are using it to buy storageā¦ donāt hoard the coin too much)
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The only thing any sane human being would do: immediately sell them as soon as they hit my wallet. If they spend more than 1 second in my wallet, I count it as a complete and utter failure on my end.
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The questions remains how Storj wants to keep its SNOs motivated to stay with that volatile token value. I mean, itās kind of a hobby but still weāve to pay our electricity bills.
I donāt get this, you should swap to a stable coin or other as soon as it hits your wallet. Otherwise, what you have effectively done is that you purchased the equivalent amount of STORJ using your nominal USD earnings and are now speculating on the asset, which is outside of their control.
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You guys still donāt get it, do you? Weāve answered this question a thousand times already: The price of the storj token is IRRELEVANT. You immediately market sell without even looking at the price you sell at. Donāt even glance at it, just hit the market sell button. Thatās the only use for the storj token (if you are only interested in the SNO side of it).
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Its not worth enough to sell, gambling on it hitting a dollar one day or more! Thats how I roll.
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There is nobody buying at the moment as the price appears to be going down.
As soon as the company runs out of coin there will suddenly be a big buyer who has to buy.
Iāll let you work out when they run out and what will happen. Perhaps they will buy a million to last a while, perhaps they will not. Perhaps they will mint a new coin or go bust. Perhaps Trump will annouce tarrifs on data
There are line items on their token flow reports for tokens they used to company employees.
So rug pulling long term employees probably isnāt in the cards.
The whole structure of the token was built around an ico and a treasury of Storj tokens used to fund operations, with an understanding that eventually the treasury would be empty and they would need a flip to profitability at that point because Storj tokens would need to be purchased in the open market in order to pay node holders, which couldnāt happen if Storj wasnāt profitable.
The obvious conclusion beinf that if Storj became profitable, the forced buying would lead to an increased price. Not a guarantee, but thatās what the logic tokenomics points to. Of course Storj could not become profitable, meaning that when they ran out of tokens in the treasury the whole system would collapse.
So what actually happened?
As the token reserves began to run out Storj raised their prices. A thing that a growth company looking to flip to profitability would do. Confirming that aspect of the thesis.
Storj then reiterated their commitment to the token, setting up a system for token buybacks, further strengthening the tokenomics.
I donāt know why some people are so against the token. Itās an interesting experiment in financing a decentralized business that actually appears to be working as it was designed.
I havenāt seen any examples of successful utility tokens except for Storj.
Itās not surprising that the token is going down in a high interest rate environment that discourages speculation and small cap stocks.
I believe in the success of Storj the business because itās visible.
I also believe in the tokenomics because they are what they are, and the changes that have been made have only been in the direction of improving them.
It stands to reason that given enough time, if the success of the business continues, and the tokenomics continue as they are, that the token value will increase as the storage network grows and demand for the token subsequently increases.
Time will tell.
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If a company goes bust I donāt think āemployees who own tokensā is even on the list of ā¦ actually I donāt know maybe it is.
As for the rest of your (apologies) sales pitch - if any of that was guaranteed it would already be āpriced inā
I said no one is buying. This is clearly nonsense. I dont know what i meant
This is all getting too complicated.
They offered to pay me tokens. I agreed to be paid with tokens. And they have reliably paid me in tokensā¦ month after month after month: like clockwork 
If, at some time, I decide to turn those tokens into something elseā¦ thatās a āme problemā. If I have trouble turning those tokens into something else: I donāt go cry in a vendors forum 
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No, itās very simple. Let me condense the whole discussion.
- Volatile settlement instrument ā nonsense.
- 1 was tolerated at the early stage of company bootstrap, and the risk was more than compensated by obnoxious artificial traffic and unrealistic payout rates.
- 2 is no longer happening. Operators are now exposed to uncompensated volatility risk.
- āBwahahah you agreed to it now suffer peasants!ā Is not a valid business strategy going forward. You agreed in the past. Times have moved. Now this agreement is no longer justified.
Thatās all there is to it.
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That makes no sense. If a SNO feels the compensation is too low, or the agreement is āno longer justifiedāā¦ they leave. But weāve gained almost 6000 nodes in the last year.
So, itās very simple. SNOs continue to agree with the current compensation. Those who are unhappyā¦ certainly are vocalā¦ but are in such a small minority they can be ignored. But are free to keep yelling at the clouds.
Thatās all there is to it.
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No. Tolerating a system is not the same as agreeing with it. As Don Norman put it, people tend to adapt to flawed systems rather than fight them ā adaptation is not endorsement.
Node count is not indicative of economic soundness.. People join systems for many reasons: incomplete information, short time horizons, sunk costs, or the expectation that conditions will change. It does not mean they like the current state of affiars.
āThey stay therefore they approveā only works in frictionless consumer markets.. Infrastructure markets are sticky ā participation reflects inertia and switching costs, not endorsement.
Doing the right thing when you donāt have to is what builds trust. Continuing to pay operators with a volatile token chips away at that trust.
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Again, that makes no sense. The friction to leavingā¦ is stopping a docker container. Effectively zero. Which means the current SNOs ālike the current state of affiarsā more than running a single command to not participate at all.
A climbing node count is the simplest and clearest sign that the majority agree with the current compensation.
Youāve listed many reasons a SNO may choose to leave. And they have. Theyāve been making the same decision to stay-or-go for years. And here we are: growing.
Well if they go bust then they arenāt profitable and both the equity and the utility coin go to 0.
Iām saying that if a company builds itself from an ICO, with tokenomics designed to tie the value of their token to use of their network once their business model reaches profitability, compensates early employees with their token, then as their business model reaches profitability they reaffirm their commitment to that strategy by strengthening their tokenomics, the next thing to happen isnāt going to be a rug pull of those token compensated employees.
Of course nothing is guaranteed. There hasnāt ever been a profitable company that used a utility token to power commerce on their network. So of course this is all highly speculative.
However, what I believe is āguaranteedā is IF you push high and ever increasing volumes of forced buying into an instrument with fixed supply and limited liquidity the price of that instrument will increase.
At worst the Storj company and its token are an interesting experiment in a new way of funding/running a company. And of the hundreds who have tried Storj is the only one who appears to be succeeding.
TLDR: Storj is a 1:1 in the utility token model and I donāt see them pivoting away from that model.
Stopping a container is trivial. But this is not the whole picture. They woudl then need to find alternative use for the spare capacity, this is far from trivial. People tolerate low-yield systems all the time because the income runs in the background and inertia is powerful.
Node count proves very little. Entry is easy; understanding the economics takes longer. Headline growth can coexist with weak incentives for quite a while.
Iāll say it again: Participation is not endorsement.
Growth by itself says nothing about efficiency. You donāt know whether the network would be growing faster ā or more sustainably ā without leaking value into the market every month.
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If someone feels the compensation is no longer acceptable, they donāt need an alternate use of spare capacityā¦ before turning off a node. They certainly could decide to keep participating until they find an alternative though: I agree. Do you know of a service that pays more for used-space, today?
If youāre saying many people decide some-money-is-better-than-no-moneyā¦ I agree with you. I think weāre on to something hereā¦
It think I see whatās going on now!
Participation is something that can be counted (like active nodes). But āendorsementāā¦ is how those SNOs feel. Something we canāt count. I canāt speak to how many nodes are happy or unhappy: I can only point to some graphs that track an increasing year-over-year rate of participation.
I defer to you to guess feelings 
Oh man, I just got my head around participation vs. endorsement: now weāre counting efficiency. Sounds like a nuanced and lively topic for a different thread: but I can dance 
The payouts weāve had over the years, reduction after reduction, have lead Storj to being on the cusp of profitability, with more paid used space than ever, more available space than ever, and a wider diversity and count of nodes than ever. I donāt know if different payout decisions would have gotten them here faster: all I can say is those payout decisions worked. It grew them to a point another company decided to buy them: something that other company wouldnāt have done if they didnāt see dollar signs in the future 
If Storj isnāt in-the-black yet, so canāt afford stablecoin payouts, and canāt afford extra fees from having an external service distribute money-they-donāt haveā¦ do you have an idea of how they could improve efficiency?
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