we are also getting yet another hike in electricity costs here.
squeezing me closer towards not being profitable.
yea i donât know about this, mayby STORj should do its own video platform, just to show how fast and reliable it is. And do its own backup tool like dropbox, because all this relaying on other developers is anoying, mayby others, developers have no will, because they are not willing to risk, if theres no visible known proof that service put on stroj will work. I think many could do, but they simply donât believe, coz they did not saw a working proof. Making one, even small with just a news videos, or backup from Youtube just to show, would be inspirational, if people would see theres no throttling, or anything. Actually i have no idea why any streaming learning platforms dont use storj exclusively already, nothing more frustrating than sitting with great product for them, and they just donât use it. My egress for few nodes of mine i just checked is 38GB for all month of JUNE, with 1,8TB filled, and other is 80GB egress, basically egress does not exist at the moment, and im soooo capable of, actually⌠and no one knows the service like STORj knows, sooo it should be first to make something with itâŚ
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Operators already complain about compensation. If you have more operators â each will be compensated less.
Anything that node pays above zero is pure profit. Because alternative is still paying for electricity and doing server maintenance but having massive amounts of idle free space.
Node just helps reduce the expenses of running the server and costs you nothing. Any amount of expense reduction is acceptable because its better than zero.
You have fixed cost of time investment installing it and then it continuously reduces the cost of running the server. Itâs worth it at any compensation rates.
For me â even at zero. I already have space that I donât use. Might as well someone else benefits from it.
If you expected storage node income to pay for hardware, electricity, maintenance, and take your kids through college â that was never the plan.
In other words Iâm all for further reduction of payments. Today node pays too much for too little.
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just because you want to sponsor StorjLabs business doesnât mean others do.
i think you arenât aware of the true costs you have.
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It does not make sense to develop apps, where good apps already exist. For example the backup-case: you may simply use Duplicati or Rclone with the native Storj-Integration. So you can make full use of storj and all the benefits without having to rwrite all the backup-logic itself.
Having a video platform on top of storj would be great - but again: someone has to develop it, that costs time and money. And the benefit might not be that big.
For storj labs it might be more interesting to get the backend for other services, that take care of their business and marketing on their own and simply use storj.
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Life is not a zero sum game
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if you think this way â then you shall stop your nodes right now. Because running the nodes is sponsoring a business by donating unused resources , in exchange for âtipsâ.
Letâs make this actionable. What are those âtrue costsâ you have in mind?
Of course you canât expect storj to pay you to provide storage at full cost, because then it would be cheaper for them to run their own datacenter and not pay someone else, let alone average joes, do that for them (plus overhead, plus profits, plus your profits). So, by definition, by hosting a node, you are subsidizing their business. The only question is â to what degree.
Why then would anyone do it? Because the tips they pay you more than cover the few hours of your time needed to setup the node and cost you nothing else. So, the strictly commercial question is whether it is worth it to spend one hour of your time and get $5/month indefinitely or not.
My true costs, not counting hanging out on this forum, which is a form of entertainment to me, is an initial investment of about 2 hours writing script for FreeBSD (which I did not have to do, most people just run a pre-made container on linux) and 15 min of time once a year to sell tokens. All the while the $5, $10, $15, whatever/month keeps dripping. (The non-monetary satisfaction that my excess capacity is not wasted is much more rewarding. In fact, even $100/month would not be worth to lift a finger otherwise. Why would you waste the unused resources when you can donate them? Makes no sense to me. And if that someone else (storj) can make money off of that â good on them. I donât lose anything by donating unused resources)
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I think there is not a lot enthusiasts that donate their resources.
Most people try to make some money with resources they have or invest.
If you can use those resources to earn more money â definitely do it, but then these are no longer free extra resources. But if you are not using the resources otherwise and they just sit idle â why not donate them? This is where storj comes in: they can make use of capacity you have but not using. Then any compensation, literally any, is free money.
Itâs literally zero vs something. Any amount of something is infinitely more than nothings. Especially since there are 0 maintenance costs â Storj team does all the work.
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Not all that wonderful like this, there lot of things for what we need to pay that it work. electricity one of it. For me it is pure second work, with almost free choice of work time. It helps to pay for my apartments. I am agree to donate some resources that someone in trouble get helped, but i do not agree to donate resources that someone make business on it.
You are not a typical storage node operator, and you know it :). You seem to be actually running multiple nodes and treating it as a business, and therefore have expenses and electricity, etc. What you do is still only possible in areas with low cost of living, low electricity costs, etc, etc.
For people who share excess capacity on existing hardware â they donât have even those expenses. Drives are already spinning anyway, and cost of 0.1% of CPU time is negligible. Storegenode does not require maintenance â what makes it âsecond work for youâ? Keeping server online? I do it anyway for the other stuff that runs on it. Change drives when they fail â same. There is nothing that I do that woudl not have needed to to had I not been running a node. Itâs literally zero maintenance thingâŚ
This is a philosophical question, not a technical nor economic one. I donate stuff I donât need all the time, to companies, nonprofits, and corporations, indiscriminately; and if someone else makes money on this â why should I be upset? I was going to waste the resource anyway.
to be honest all this is philosophy, my setup is profitable even today, I am not happy with reductions, but I want my profit sustainable event it is smaller.
and we are out of topic.
Of course. But nobody promised this to continue forever and storj always warned to not buy anything and only used unused resources â thatâs the whole point of this project.
You have done differently and benefited from subsidies. Now the compensation moves to reflect real costs and at some point it will obviously become unprofitable to run storj on dedicated hardware: if that was sustainable Storj would have just done it themselves. Like Backblaze. (Btw Backblaze was still not profitable last time I checked).
So, you are upset that the free lunch is over. Understandable.
Folks who followed the advice and only used unused resources continue to receive free money from storj in the form of pure profit on their $0 investment.
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I mean like chatgpt, i heard from an CEO of âCosmos AIâ, that there was an open ia api, before gpt3 popularity, so enybody could make a an interface and make a first chat with it, but no one did, so they had to do it them selfs. i think the case is somewhat similar: so much need for video those days, and so little use i see, just âWTF?â - im asking. Actually tried Duplicati and Rclone, and they are not user frendly at all, like dropbox for normal windows user.
if here would be only enthusiastsâ that donate space, there would be not more than Ptb of space, thats why Storj donated for long time big ingress price, that people who has resources started to be involved here. now lot of people have their infrastructure build and we see that there is lot of overcome in free space. there is time to start to be sustainable. Storj lowered prices that they can compete on a market, and it was understandable that it is mater of time when our prices go down.
Those people who thod it will be long donated got upset. but i think it is part of their own error also, if you invest make research before. I made several K of investments, but all of this money I got as payoit from storj.
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John is doing his bit to increase node utilization! Since the town hall went live we had a drop of well over 100 nodes. 
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You have them for a long time:
- Backup tools: Guides to Using Third-Party Tools - Storj Docs
- File transfer tools: Guides to Using Third-Party Tools - Storj Docs
rclone mountusing Getting Started with Rclone Configuration - Storj Docsrclone syncusing Rclone (this will be like a OneDrive or DropBox)- Mountain Duck if you prefer GUI
- And many other integrations like Guide for Integrating Arq Backup Software with Storj - Storj Docs or Setting Up and Using Cyberduck - Storj Docs
See https://www.storj.io/partner-solutions/Adobe
See also
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I apologize for the delay in getting these answers up. Please let me know if you want additional details on anything.
QUESTION: When test satellites will be decommissioned completely and HELD amount returned.
As I yet have 7+ tb from this satellite, when it will be deleted or I already can delete it my self? [Vadim]
RESPONSE: As test satellites are decommissioned, all held amounts will be paid out. Weâre in the process of winding down some of the test satellites. The process should be done in the next month or two. We will provide instructions related to any residual data soon. Saltlake will continue to operate as our test satellite.
QUESTION: Is there any plans to make edge services or repair service to SNOs operate, it will save lot of money and give possible to make SNOs additional income. Time frame? [Vadim]
RESPONSE: Weâve looked at this as a possible option, but itâs not currently scoped. There is not a GitHub ticket associated with this item on the roadmap or a blueprint in process. If you have specifics on how you would anticipate this would work and any edge cases or security concerns to capture, please share with the team and we can get a ticket started. (There was some initial discussion in this post.)
QUESTION: Any plans to modify the payout rates further in the near future seeing the node churn after the last payout changes? [zip]
RESPONSE: After the most recent announcement on payout changes for July usage, we have no specific plans to make additional payout changes for the foreseeable future. Weâll observe how the network responds and look at the overall impact based on the level of egress, but any future changes will be proposed well in advance with an opportunity for discussion. We got a few comments that I wasnât sufficiently clear that weâre not planning anything specific at this time. I apologize for the confusion.
QUESTION: How much of a performance did the network gain as the TCP FO was implemented? [zip]
RESPONSE: TCP FO is implemented but not enabled / supported on the majority of nodes. Isolated benchmarks showed the benefit of TCP Fast Open, but full e2e measurement requires either more nodes or a way to restrict operations to FO enabled nodes.
Weâre looking at ways to communicate with node operators to get broader adoption by node operators. Itâs definitely something we want to see expand.
QUESTION: You said that Storj is a platform for development, but I see that not many developers know about Storj and few people choose Storj to develop their new products. How to promote more strongly Storj to the software developer community? Should Storj hold hackathons or not? Should Storj organize a marketing campaign targeting tech enthusiasm and software developers? [nyancodex[
RESPONSE: We initially marketed Storj to developers as a developer tool and geared a number of things, including the free tier to appeal to that user segment. We envisioned the ultimate user of Storj generally to be someone with developer, devops or sysadmin skills. This approach ultimately didnât drive larger scale usage with customers who have larger data sets in the tens/hundreds of TB or multi PB scale. Weâve evolved our marketing to appeal to enterprise customers and that has definitely been much more impactful. Weâve steadily been onboarding larger customers and are seeing traction with a larger number of multi PB opportunities.
We have participated in a number of hackathons and worked with other developer communities, but weâve found that the best way to drive rapid growth has been tops-down by marketing to the businesses vs. bottoms up by marketing to developers.
Certainly we have a lot of developers in our community, and we love it when users of the network evangelize Storj and drive awareness and adoption.
For people and businesses that are in a position to refer business to Storj, we have a referral partner program with revenue sharing opportunities. If youâre interested, head to The Storj Partner Program and sign up to be a partner.
QUESTION: That video seems to heavily imply further cuts to payouts to come⌠specifically at 17:56⌠[penfold]
RESPONSE: No implication was intended to be inferred and I apologize for any confusion. We are doing our best to figure out the best balance with the economics and the health of the network. We expect this to be something that continues to evolve as conditions such as increasing energy prices continue to impact the overall conditions. We appreciate all the good ideas that come from the community and may ultimately find that a different payout structure altogether ends up working in the future. Whatever we do, the main things you can continue to expect are transparency, open dialog and no sudden changes.
QUESTION: I dont understand why a large Network ist Bad? Isnât it better because there a more nodes thus more reliable? And it wouldnât make a difference in the payment because it only pays for used bandwidth and storage. [MarviBiene]
RESPONSE: A large network isnât necessarily bad, as long as there is enough usage to make it economically viable for the participating nodes. The concern for a large network without meaningful utilization is that those conditions will lead to increased node churn - nodes leaving because itâs not economically rewarding or viable for them to run a node. With a large number of nodes relative to the amount of utilization, the amount of time required to get to a material level of payout is much longer, and payouts across the board will grow slowly as any uploaded data will be highly distributed across the large pool of nodes.
Increased churn leads to increased cost associated with audit and repair. Ultimately, a churn rate that is too high could impact durability if the rate is so high that repair canât keep up.
The network is healthiest with a good balance of supply and demand, with enough free capacity for anticipated demand for a few months.
QUESTION: yea i donât know about this, mayby STORj should do its own video platform, just to show how fast and reliable it is. And do its own backup tool like dropbox, because all this relaying on other developers is anoying, mayby there others, developers have no will, because they are not willing to risk, if theres no visible known proof that service put on stroj will work. I think many could do, but they simply dont belive, coz they didnât not saw. Making one, even small with just a news videos, or backup from Youtube just to show, would be inspirational, if people would see theres no throttling, or anything. Actually i have no idea why any straming learning platforms dont use storj only already, nothing mroe frustrating thank sitting with great product for them, and they just dont use it. My egress for few nodes of mine i just checked is 38GB for all month of JUNE, with 1,8TB filled, and other is 80GB egress, basicly egress does not exist at the moment, and im soooo capable actually⌠and no one knows the service like STORj knows, sooo it should be first to make something with it⌠[Ruskiem]
RESPONSE: There is a lot packed into this comment so Iâll respond to a few of the different ideas in it.
Storj Video Platform - with a relatively small engineering team, we have to be laser focused on our target market. Thereâs a lot we could do, but the best use of our resources is to deliver the best object storage service on the market. The way we address solutions like a full end-to-end video storage and streaming solution is through partnerships, for example with Livepeer. We work closely with Livepeer and have a growing number of joint customers. The combination of Storj+Livepeer is an excellent and cost effective solution that is superior to some of the more widely adopted streaming services on the market, such as Cloudflare, for example.
Dropbox-like consumer storage - we get a lot of comments on this topic, but itâs an entirely different product, market, customer, support model, etc. It would be like running a second company and again, we have to choose where to deploy our resources. This has been another category where we choose to partner (Drivex, Mountainduck, Amove)
Backup software - Weâve integrated with a number of different applications and have been expanding our partnerships with backup providers. Weâve found the most effective strategy is to integrate with backup software providers as technology partners, then work through the systems integrators and VARs that support those applications. Working through these established channels is much easier than establishing a brand presence from the ground up.
The Storj network is great for high bandwidth use cases and we continue to explore new ways to expand our presence there, particularly in the media and entertainment industry. We find conferences to be a great way to generate new customer prospects and will be at both IBC in Amsterdam and NAB in New York coming up.
Again, we appreciate the open dialog and the support for the network from the node community!
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If you have an outstanding question that was missed in a previous Town Hall please feel free to respond with it in this thread or DM one of the mods and we will do our best to get it answered for you.
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i understand now. i guess what is missing, is just a communicating this, and highlighting.
Like at How Storj Works
Showing exactly where other parties implemented storj, and pointing prospects into it, to check for them selfs, so they could get biased free idea, thats really that good, not only in sellers demo.
Because that 2 videos in demo are cool, but not trustworthy (" everyone emphasizes their good points"). What is trustworthy is 3rd parties who implemented a storj solution, and is free to check.
Leaving that demo website so empty, without pointing to partners, leaves impression like noone already tried that STORJ, and thats not true!
Also im checking livepeer website, and i dont see even a STORJ logo anywhere, or explained how its implemented in it, or the benefits thanks to it. And i see others logos, also the livepeer explanation how it works and what it does is too complicated. Storj is just storj, it just allows BEST storage for files and video streaming, i donât see how livepeer is doing a good job in marketing that simple and easyâŚ
Hi and thanks for the feedback. We do a number of things with Livepeer that drive joint usage. We were on the main stage at ETH Denver together, at NAB together earlier this year and will be at IBC and NAB NYC later this year. We both have joint documentation and have ongoing collaboration. Check out Transcode Video with Storj - Livepeer Documentation for example. We are working on tighter integration and better co marketing. The combination of Storj and Livepeer is an excellent end-to-end video streaming solution.
We also have been increasing the number of customer quotes on the website and also the number of solution briefs with partners. Check out the home page as well as the Partner page.
We also continue to get good analyst coverage from mainstream analysts at IDC, Forrester, Gigaom and Blocks & Files.
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