Yeah, but fees there are even higher than converting to FIAT. And I have to trust them! When it comes to FIAT I say „not your $ in your pocket, not your $“
An Apple gift card is not real money to me.
While I generally appreciate the decision I really don’t get the argument of “the network is too big and is growing too fast”.
SNOs will always add more nodes as long as it is profitable. Channging the prices will not stop this basic economic reality. It will just move the node distribution to countries where the profit is the highest (low electricity pricing combined with access to cheap and reliable internet). And they will keep adding nodes until it’s not profitable anymore and kick out the nodes with low profit.
Low profit nodes will be kicked out eventually unless they’re subsidized to still be profitable even if does not make sense economically (current situation).
Even if you would increase the payouts at some point the situation will be the same (nodes are being added until it’s nit profitable and it would take years to fill the disk and while it might be still profitable for some node operators it won’t be for others with higher operating costs)
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Storj Labs is not a non-profit organization that tries to make sure anyone can run a profitable node. It’s business and the cheapest and most reliable nodes will survive. Others won’t.
If you run a business and have higher costs than others around you, then your business is going to collapse soon. And no one is going to subsidize you unless there is some greater benefit to keeping you beyond mere profitability. One of them could be a unique geo-location in case of a storagenode. But as soon as others pop up around you with lower costs, you lose your only benefit.
Is this a guess or where did you get this info from? Bitrefill even has deposit addresses on L2 which is much cheaper than transferring to an exchange on L1.
A giftcard from a supermarket I shop in anyway is as good as cash to me.
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So now the most important question is, if I will realize that after the payout rates update keeping the node will mean a loss, and I started it less than 15 months ago, I will be able to do graceful exit?
does this mean dataloss?
No. Losing least profitable nodes won’t affect the network. The others will take over missing pieces and eventually compensate for the drop in available free space.
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“Cheapest” and “most reliable” I think they refer to distinct nodes. 
If you refer to cheapest runing costs, than yeah, you’re right, but not cheapest hardware.
Cheapest to run. Cheapest in terms of profitability.
And with “cheapest” and “most reliable” I meant that there are variables like “running cost (or profitability?)” and “reliability”. So then you can put a point for each node on a graph where axes are those variables. Then some area of it will be nodes that are going to outlive others.
(^ more or less, don’t want to think about it more at this point)
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How can you be sure?
I am not 100%, but that’s how the network works. Some nodes go away, either gracefully or abruptly, then other nodes download/restore pieces stored on them. In order to lose any data the node drop rate would have to be huge. And even if it happens to be huge, it won’t be huge overnight. So no data loss unless you totally forget about it and Storj Labs nukes the project. But that would be something you should be notified about to have time to relocate your data safely. And for now we have no indication that things could go south out of the blue.
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Well I looked what I could use on that site. Only thing that I found useful was
Mostly agree. For my supermarket, I could buy a 54$ card for 59$.
That leaves me with two options:
A: I send all tokens to Kraken and monthly transfer it to FIAT. I pay 1$. I get FIAT on my bank account. I go to my supermarket, pay with my normal credit card, get 1-3% cashback reward. I risk loosing my monthly payment if Kraken goes belly up before I withdraw everything.
B: I get tokens in my wallet, pay fees to transfer it to bitrefill, buy a giftcard worth 54$ for 59$, go to my supermarket, redeem that giftcard and pay the rest with my CC. And the risk is exactly the same, if the company goes belly up my monthly payment is gone.
So yeah, option A is way less of a hassle and way cheaper. All while having exactly the same risks.
What giftcard was that? In Europe a €50 giftcard costs exactly €50 and it’s the same for most giftcards in the US. I only saw some giftcards where they add $0.20 or $0.25 per giftcard like BestBuy or Home Depot. Nowhere could I find any giftcard where you pay $5 more than the face value. Some giftcards even give you 1 or 3% rewards.
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It works if the network is truely decentralized, but in fact when someone like this guy www.th3van.dk goes offline then…
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So he’s running 107 nodes with 10TB each and he can afford them for 30 USD per month. He probably will have to shut them down soon. It’s going to be interesting, but if he does a graceful exit it shouldn’t hurt the network too much.
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Y should he shut them down?
The more nodes, the more efficient i would assume.
Or… has negociated special payouts. Storj pays him more, and he runs a profesional data center long term. 
This is just an asumption, don’t take it as a fact.
it also can be his own datacenter
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It doesn’t matter. Even if these nodes disappeared over night, there would be no loss.
For the calculation I assumed ALL segments are at the repair threshold to get the worst case scenario. In reality they are spread out between 54 and 80 pieces, of which 29 need to be available to recover the segment.
But in order to make it show data at all, I had to drop the repair threshold in my example to 50.
With 107 nodes disappearing at once in this scenario, there is a 0.000000000000000000000000004639% chance that ANY segment gets lost at all. Pretty good margin away from the 11 9’s of durability Storj promises.
Feel free to do your own calculations.
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In addition to my above calculation. Storj monitors piece availability for each segment stored on the network. When it falls below the repair threshold, repair workers kick in to retrieve 29 healthy pieces, recreate the encrypted segment and generate enough new pieces to bring the total back up to 80. I believe the repair threshold is set to 54 at the moment. The lowest availability of segments on any customer satellite is 51.
Only healthy pieces are counted towards that availability. Pieces are marked as unhealthy when nodes go offline are suspended or disqualified. This is also why your node loses some data after being offline for a while. The unhealthy pieces for which the segment dropped below the repair threshold will be repaired and places on other nodes.
This system provides incredible reliability, even when large numbers of nodes go offline or disappears at the same time.
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