Update on Storage node payouts

EU1 is customer data. Though the sudden increase is a little curious. I’m not sure how much of that is free tier usage, possibly abuse.

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Overall very happy with the 1.50$ Tbm. With that halfway stable i would be extremely flexible around all the egress payment.
For Storj it’s of course important to keep it high enough so people don’t just all bandwidth limit their nodes and cause the Network performance to tank.
Currently most income is of course from egress but we all knew that it was not sustainable. With 1.50tbm i can pay electricity and on average the disk also pays for itself (if it’s full decently fast)

All in All. I’m happy

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Just to add on how to do it. You can add the below line to exclude any satellite of your choosing. Here I have added Europe North 1 to config.yaml

storage2.trust.exclusions: “12rfG3sh9NCWiX3ivPjq2HtdLmbqCrvHVEzJubnzFzosMuawymB@europe-north-1.tardigrade.io:7777”

Above satellite won’t show up in your dashboard either. The only “drawback” is you would see untrusted satellite line in your log from time to time.

List of satellites can be found at https://www.storj.io/dcs-satellites

PS: Don’t forget to restart your node after updating config.yaml file.

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I get that we can’t quantify things exactly due to the unit variables but the trends are clear. bigger nodes with greater efficiencies. “Work just fine” is also vague. More clear would be to say smaller nodes will earn less - even with greater egress - which may be acceptable to some SNO’s. The smaller nodes that are alone will also have to deal with the transaction fees - Given the small nodes new income the 10% zksync bonuses might not even cover those fees or expose themselves to token fluctuation. The whole thing taken together just means running a smaller node will become a whole lot harder to make very little. Again - I get why this needs to happen. Storj needs to make money. But I do not think the situation for smaller SNO’s is being stated clearly enough. We disagree. The world doesn’t end.

Not if you do this on a fresh node. That line shows up because the satellite is already listed in the node databases. If you exclude them from the start, I don’t think the log line would be there.

I don’t think we do. I think there is quite some beating around the bush in some of the language used. I merely disagreed about that particular message. Littleskunk tends to be pretty direct. Which I personally appreciate. I think you were right that it’s a bit of a cultural thing, when I visited the US I was surprised by how everyone was doing the extremely nice “customer service” style thing. It felt super fake. But when an American visits the Netherlands they would certainly think we’re just rude. So pick your poison. I prefer the more direct communication, but I’m not exactly unbiased.

If that was the case then wouldn’t removing database entry for Stefan’s satellite fix the issue of his satellite showing up in the log.

This is true, but there is no easy way to start a node with just one click to exclude the test satellites’ data. For example, how can you calculate it in your earnings calculator, what is the chance/share of test data?
This is what I wrote earlier. Think about that how many different people do you see here in the forum and how many nodes there are. Pro node operators will do clear math to calculate if it worth to keep test data, but Avg Joe will just start his node. Soon he will realize that he is receiving more test data than customers’ and eventualy he will run away by simply switching off the node. This is bad for everyone.

I have a question from this:
If you lower payments to the point Storj is profitable but most nodes stick around such that the rate of filling does not dramatically increase - what then? Do you continue to lower SNO incomes to force people to leave?

I feel Like the Average Joe, I was just planning to start my nodes… and now this, anyway the question for you is, why do you say that? isnt test data paid as much as customer data?

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So you Netherlands like it straight in the face as well?

Lol. Yes. Meetings with Germans and US-Americans are always fun. Germans are very rude and straightforward for US people.

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When I was working in Oman I worked with a lot of different cultures ranging from African nations, European and in the Asia/Pacific. But, it was Americans I always butted heads with. Particularly American management types. I remember one day doing cultural awareness training and the local Omani guy saying specifically “The aim of the exercise is NOT to win”. So, what was the first thing out of the American Manager on our team? “Team, we need to win this!” I was just gobsmacked at the deafness. So yeah, a lot of cultural differences.

Care to explain how you came up with that? Because to me, it is exactly the opposite.

Bigger nodes are more efficient
Not sure I would agree with that. Bigger drives may be more efficient than smaller drives but that’s about it.

Let’s compare @BrightSilence big nodes with my small node. He will add another 20TB drive for 350$ to his Synology setup and use an additional 8W. I create a new 20TB dataset on my TrueNAS that is running anyway so 0W for free. Not only is my node more efficient, but it is also way cheaper.

Even if you say “Well, that is not realistic, you only use unused resources guys are an exception” I don’t know if a bigger node has to be more efficient than a smaller node. Server hardware is not necessarily more power efficient than a raspi cluster.

The only point I agree is that STORJ works poorly out of the box because of its file sizes, DB, and in my opinion wrong design choices. It is easier to combat these problems for bigger nodes.

Smaller nodes have less margin
I disagree again for the same reasons. Sure I pay 1$ every month to withdraw a smaller amount than he does. But on the other hand, @BrightSilence has way higher costs of running the node. Because I have no costs at all, prices for electricity could double and payouts could be cut in half, I could still host a profitable node. My margin is higher and even if it goes down further I will be able to stay profitable longer than he does.

The bigger problem I see for small nodes is that if the payout drops too low, some of them will think about if it is even worth the hassle of setting up and managing a node.

This thread is getting crazy off topic! Instead of payouts you guys are talking about cultural differences. Anyway I am really glad that @john had the balls to communicate so directly. With that direct communication he finally put these “STORJ is so great, we should charge customers 50$/TB and create a Google Photos equivalent” naive dreamers to bed. One stupid thing less we have to argue about :heart_eyes:

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It would and this was even suggested by someone from Store once. But I don’t like messing with the databases. I’m not sure what else that would impact and it might break dashboard and historic stats from working properly. So I’d rather keep the error.

I’ve been thinking about that. As the lowered payouts are eventually intended to be used on all sats, I’m considering dropping the egress payout value for everything along with the payout on test sats on the earnings estimator. And just add a note that customer satellites still pay out a little more. That way new node operators prepare for the future situation instead of the current one and onboarding rates will be somewhat representative of having that rate of payout an all sats, which might be helpful in determining if that is still viable for node acquisition.

That’s not the whole story. These drives usually replace the smallest ones in my array, 4TB recently. And this is also an always on device that would run with or without Storj. So I get an additional 16TB at 0W costs. Then I decide whether it’s worth it to run that 4TB externally. With the $1.50 remaining in place it probably will be. So I end up running that at 8W costs. But if that’s no longer profitable, I’ll exit the external nodes or migrate them to internal. I’ve already done that with some smaller disks.

So I kind of run 2 setups. One internally at no recurring costs and one externally as long as the cost income ratio is worth it. It’s hobby too, so I’m fine running those external ones at break even, but not at a loss.

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it not just about IOPS and head speed, when you have lot of files in folders, library in folder start to be big, and then you need more time to read it to find file.

ohh, than we are on the (almost, you need 8W for the 4TB external) same boat. I thought you run special hardware for your nodes.

Yes, you need to compare the number of files increase vs the IOPS increase. I need to say, maybe you are right, but it is not 100% sure in all case, like how much is the drive filled.

I think the 20TB example is the extreme due to the cost. I personally think the sweet spot for larger drives right now is the 6TB-10TB range currently as for me this strikes a balance between cost and capacity. That of course may be different for different people in different markets.

Lets take a 2TB drive as an example. My first Storj node was on a 2TB RAID1 array though that was deleted long ago now. If fact that server has also now departed as I didn’t use it for anything else after Storj was removed.

So we have a max earnings of 2 x $1.50 for storage. Plus egress. If we assume the mid point of the Storj proposal of $3.00 per TB after changes and the entire 2TB gets downloaded in a month the maximum earnings possible are $9.00 for the month. Assuming the node is 10 months or older with no withheld.

If the SNO was using a 4TB drive then they have far greater earning capacity simply because they can store more. So 4x $1.50 is there max earnings for storage. . Even if the egress was the same between the nodes just the difference in stored data capacity results in greater earnings. More capacity to store results in more earnings because you can grow. I am not including electricity costs at all here since my Microserver also is always on and still provides some network services to the home LAN like tftpd, NFS, DNS and Anonymous ftp and some SAMBA shares. Using what I have as per Storj mantra.

As per the next one -
" Smaller nodes have less margin

So if you are on zksync the costs to do transfers don’t go up in a linear fashion as far as I am aware. So the cost to transfer $30 to an exchange is not half the cost of transferring $60. But the larger amount you earn the larger amount of 10% bonus. So for example the whales that earn $500 a month are getting a $50 bonus - more than enough to pay for any transfer fees. For those earning less than $10 a month as my original node did for many, many months means that more of the 10% zksync bonus will be consumed cashing out the tokens to fiat.
Again, the smaller the amount the greater percentage of earnings will be consumed by transfer costs. @BrightSilence himself mentioned he only used to cash out periodically for this reason.
That is probably not true now though since his earnings have risen over time.

If you aren’t on zksync and don’t get the 10% bonus (I am not- I hated zksync) the same thing is still true. If you plan to cash out to fiat there are fees to be paid and having smaller payments means a greater % of the payment is consumed by them. This doesn’t apply if you use an exchange wallet as your payout address but that is not recommended by Storj in the first place.
As they say, not your keys, not your tokens.

The setup is really pretty trivial. But taking the time to look after the node can be a little more time consuming. And you need to plan any maintenance so as to not have excessive downtime.
This I do see as a problem for smaller node operators. At some point it may just not be worth the time consumed for some.

For storage yes, for egress no, please read the opening post about it.

This is important, becouse:
1, looking at various posts and topics, it seems that nodes which are sitting in datacenters have higher chances to win a race than nodes sitting in family homes’ cabinets. Also nodes with SSD storage have higher chances to win against nodes with HDD storage. In general, pro nodes are in datacenters (kind of) and have faster storage than Avg Joe’s node.
2, To translate in to numbers, I see that pro nodes have higher egress/stored data rate than home nodes: pro nodes can have 1:1 ratio or even better, while for example my home nodes have 1:4 ratio even though I have 1000/300Mbit connection in an east-EU capital city home.
3, Stored data pay rate is same, regardless if it is test or customer. But egress income will be lower for test data. Looking at the Storj Network Stats customer egress is much more than test egress.
4, If any node gets full, it will be more beneficial to have customer data stored on it than test data. The egress is more for customer data and income is also more for the same amount of egress.
5, Due to all the above, as soon as pro nodes are getting closer to full, they will GE from the test satellites. In this case all the test data will move to the non-pro / new nodes which will have even more disadvantages after that.

This is why I think that it would be good/fair to have a temporary new-node restriction and/or make it very easy to opt out from the test sats by a button click when you start a very new node.

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Since different satellites will be paying different amounts for the same data stored, there should be a way to reduce the amount of data stored by a satellite (but not completely) or somehow set priorities.

If I have limited space available, I would like to use that space to store files from the satellite that pays more, then, if there is space left over, I could store files from a satellite that pays less.

Right now it’s either exit from the test satellite and have a lot of empty space or not do that, but then have no more space for the satellite that pays more.

If you follow the STORJ mantra, you make a profit no matter how big your node is. But yeah, bigger nodes can of course earn more.

I am not, because I don’t trust L2

I just set my wallet on kraken, don’t have to transfer anything and just pay 1$ for the SWIFT bank transaction.

Well, that is stupid and does not apply here on a utility token. If we assume STORJ to be an utility token, you don’t speculate but just convert it to FIAT. And to convert it to FIAT I will have to sooner or later trust an exchange. As soon as you try to exchange it, you will have to give up the not your keys not your tokens mantra.

A bad setup is trivial, a good one is not. DB has to be outsourced, you have to tune your filesystem a lot. A good setup takes 0 time to look after, you only react to mail alerts.

I do it as a hobby and just for fun. Your salary would have to be extremely low to make it worthwhile.

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