Understanding how Storj business works with bandwidth constraints

I answered you’re survey, you are confusing bandwidth and ISP usage caps.
You are missing the point home user have a contract with the ISP to use the net for personal use as much as they want, like watching 10 4K Netflix stream simultaneously is fine, they get pay by Netflix for the bandwidth usage but if you read the fine prints in the contract you signed with you ISP, you can’t resell this bandwidth.
In the current state, you have a few thousands nodes worldwide with very small bandwidth usage so you’re still under the radar, if your system growth up you’ll become noticeable and the ISP’s will require Storj to pay for the bandwidth usage or the users to switch to a commercial license.
I guess the the venture capital investors already told you about this problem as a reason not to invest in your company and you considered the fund raising alternative, but finally chose the virtual money system.
The investment I made in your system is very small and I wish you good luck, but I can’t see a bright future in your scheme. HDD have a cost for the nodes, investment and electricity. A home user can backup its data to a drive, store it in its office drawer of friend home without any monthly fee or security concerns and restore it for free. In your case to have a minimal safety to be able to keep user data safe from nodes dropping off, just because they lose money keeping an HDD running 24/7 without much egress traffic or having hardware failure you need to keep a 1.5-2 redundancy 3 if you want to compare yourself to AWE stored in high security data centers.
The home user will understand that buying a spare drive is a lot cheaper than paying $20/TB restore fee plus a monthly fee.
Commercial streamers would not mind paying a $20/TB upload fee to regional nodes having an unlimited upload capability to the local ISP, unless the ISP has to beef-up the local network in which case he will apply the contract fine prints.

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Oof… well, here we go.

You mean bandwidth caps? It’s a term commonly used with ISPs and even more commonly used by cloud providers. It’s not uncommon for an initial misuse to be adopted into the language.

This is definitely not the case for all ISPs and seems a bit US oriented to me. I have no such limitations and I’m sure many other don’t either.

Storj is an actual utility token, not some throwaway thing. Also… do your research before making baseless claims. Storj Labs Inc. - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding

Tardigrade is not targetted at home users, but rather a storage backend for developers. Someone could build a backup service on top of it though. The final pricing isn’t yet announced, but the intention is to severely undercut cloud competitors on price, while matching or outperforming them on speed and reliability.

The white paper as well as a long list of blog posts go into great detail about how this is solved by using erasure codes to deliver incredibly high reliability without overdoing it on expansion factor.

All of this information is easy to find if you’re interested in learning more about how the challenges you mention are tackled and what the actual reason is behind using storj tokens. I suggest reading up a bit before suggesting it can never work.

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What is your angle here? What are you trying to prove that everyones isp is the same?

I’m not trying to prove anything, check your ISP contract it will have some clauses forbidding to resale your bandwidth to anyone.
At the time they wrote the contract they where scares about you resealing your subscription to the neighborhoods via WiFi routers. Currently we have FTTH with 1 to 10 Gbps available for personal use while some countries have far less for the all country. Storj is a for profit system and therefore not meeting the contract, very easy to block the ports or block your account.

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Each persons situation may very, depending on a variety of factors. It’s always interesting to hear about different setups.

This conversation is starting to sound a bit more like a debate than I would have expected, and I’m curious as to why. Can we be sure to keep the tone friendly?

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I think reselling meaning someone is connected to your internet that doesnt live at your house and your charging them for it. That is what reselling would be. Using your internet to upload and download is irrelevant if you pay for unlimited bandwidth its really none of there biz how you use your internet as long as its not illegal.

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Bandwidth is a term use is measured in Kbs in ADSL Mbs on cable Gbps on FTTH its bits pars seconds it has nothing to do with the monthly caps might your ISP apply to your subscription.

Interesting yeah! I do think that the rules around limits are pretty different based on location and probably vary on a per-company basis as well. (or, at least the enforcement probably varies a lot bewteen companies!)

This may not be strictly related, but I do know that in the US we have some reasonably gernerous rules around personal usage when it comes to copyrights for example. So I cant copy a DVD that I bought and then sell the copy. But I can copy the DVD for personal usage. Like, for example if I cant be parted from my vintage Starblazers episodes during the workday and need to keep a copy in the office to feel happy with the world.

Of course its a different situation, but I think perhaps interesting. On the other hand, I had a friend from another country who was shocked to see that I was ripping a backup personal copy of Mad Men when she visited me. She said that in her country it would be very illegal.

But then my other friend from a very piracy-prone country made fun of me for paying full price on the original source DVD :rofl: She said “why did you pay for somethign you can torrent”

As with all things in life, ymmv I guess :joy:

Read your contract either you have a usage cap or a commercial usage restriction. Sorry you can’t become an ISP with your Gbps link.

@lex-1 btw just out of curiosity do you mind sharing what region you’re located in? I agree that of course terms do have specific definitions, I thnk we all agree with that. … especially terms used in contracts or SLAs always have very specific meanings, aside from the conversational uses of the same word in non-official contexts

jocelyn
Yes of course I’m in France I pay €20/month about $22 for an unlimited 1Gps/400Mbps link, in Romania you’ll get the same thing for €10 Now if you read the 10+ pages contract you will found some limitations like personal use only in your contract, if you read it.

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jocelyn
If you want to send to a few friends a copyrighted DVD, crypt it and send the key using another media, its illegal but at least you know what your are sending. With Storj you have no clues of what you are relaying it can be cooking receipts or child pornography.

agree and I think that could be a topic on its own, would you like to open a thread for it?

deathlessdd
Yes, personal use mean not for profit, if you want to build a data center at home the ISP fee can be higher.

Certainly, how can I do that?

jocelynStorjling

3h

Each persons situation may very, depending on a variety of factors. It’s always interesting to hear about different setups.

This conversation is starting to sound a bit more like a debate than I would have expected, and I’m curious as to why. Can we be sure to keep the tone friendly?

I’d like to keep this conversation friendly. I’m just concerned on the Storj Business plan. It doesn’t fit residential customer, too expensive, it doesn’t fit secure backup users, unproven system, it could fit streamers looking for proxy on regional network, but not with a pricing based on upload.

I’d like to open a discussion on whats the system capabilities and what market can we aim for to be profitable for the users, Storj and nodes.

@lex-1 I actually think thats a really good question (about the business plan) that otheres would be interested in. And dont worry, we think your dialog is coming from a friendly impulse!

So heres what I think would make sense, I can split this into its own topic so that it doesn t get buried under the original discussion. Sound good? We get lots of inquiries about how the company works, and Id like to separate that out from the original topic, because the first post is a coworker of mine asking for feedback about the onboarding experience, and I want to be sure he gets what he needs as well

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@lex-1 also, just had one more thought. I can get this into the Q&A section of our Town Hall to be answered by the folks who atually create our business plans, if you do these 2 things

1.) Condense your ask to be short enough to fit on a slide (25 words or so - we use large font size)
2.) Email it to us at ask@storj.io so that the person collecting questions ahead of time will see it in the mailbox

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My apologies to you and @lex-1 , reading back my initial response in the morning it sounds a lot more snippy than I intended. I guess I had a long day yesterday. :thinking:

I agree with you that it’s a bad usage of the term, but it has been widely adopted by the industry in this way, especially in cloud services. And even ISPs often use the term bandwidth caps. I’ve given up on the fight at this point.

I did go back to read it again to be sure before I responded again. There is a clause that says it’s for “Reasonable personal use” but the wording focuses more on reasonable amounts of usage than on the personal part. I’m sure they will invoke this clause if I use 100% of my bandwidth 100% of the time, but I don’t think I’m in any danger of getting close to that on a 500/500mbit line. There is no clause on reselling bandwidth at all. Just for context I’m in the Netherlands. And I do realize now that we may be a little more progressive about net neutrality than other places in the world.

Storj has cost me nothing. I’m using spare space on a NAS that is already always on. Sure… you could argue the drives being busy costs a bit more power, but I made about $100 in payouts since march and more than that in escrow. I think the slight difference on my power bill is covered and then some. Storj works best for these kinds of scenarios. You can spend a bit of money on an rpi solution that is low power and earn it back too, but if you read up on the pitch often used, it tends to mention unused existing HDD space.

@lex-1 if you want to respond to a specific part of someones post like I did, you can just select that text in there post and a “quote” button will pop up. Click it and that will be quoted. I read your PM as well, but I think this discussion is more useful out in the open. There were a few things touched upon there that aren’t mentioned here, but I’ll respect the privacy of private messages and won’t repost and respond here. If you want to discuss some of the other topics I suggest either posting it here or creating new topics if it deviates to what is discussed here. I’ll be happy to respond with my thoughts.

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ah yes, please keep the discussion where the rest of us can see and comment! thanks brightsilence youre awesome :slight_smile: