We’ll see Are you stopping all your nodes? Cause if not you kinda prove me right. It’s gonna feel like the new normal for new comers so they won’t have high expectations to profits.
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why they should pay SNOs higher prices, if they have enough SNOs coming at lower prices under “new normal”? Where is the balance then? Storj is not decentralized project, we, as SNOs, are opportunists, not “decentralized network idealists” .
Come on, do you know better paying web3 nodes anyways? I don’t, at entry prices as storj has.
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Storj has said they want the size of the network to reduce. So they want some of us to leave. I don’t expect any kind of change unless 3000-5000 nodes leave quickly.
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The new rates seem sensible, to ensure there is opportunity for future enhancements to accelerate adoption and get the product to a point that will appeal to traditional Enterprise, and investors. This change was needed, to slow down the burn rate on tokens, and buy more time - it’s a hard place to be and understandable that some SNO’s might have to leave, but it was the right decision I think as it means I have more months of pay-outs to look forward to.
On the size of the network, I see it differently - This is the first Green light, to approve commercial SNO’s to expand at scale, as token economics mean that you now need ideally 3x the number of nodes on unique IP’s to pull the same profit - [ The ingress on new unvetted nodes is insane compared to 6 months ago ! this needs fixing as it encourages bad habit ] I hope in the future releases we will see some way of protecting the smaller home / business nodes, as they are the true decentralization hosts in all this and could be bumped out unintentionally from this change - it could also have the negative impact of geo locating nodes in locations with low energy costs, so maybe a KYC+GEO bonus, for nodes in truly unique locations that can be proven, and conversely reductions for [NEW] nodes in overpopulated Geo Locations (Germany).
On the decommissioning of the test Satellites, I would agree that having the repair and audit workers still running seems pointless ? I’m also wondering if we will get the held amount back for them, or should we be GE them now, although that seems pointless as it creates more traffic… I’m not overly happy with my disks being exercised, putting pieces into trash when ultimately the data is dead 
would it be possible to get some more information / guidance as it helps SNO’s plan maintenance windows.
CP 
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I just wonder how long this new tier will stay before another reducing? I need to know when to execute GE on my nodes. At this tier I barely make it even, but a lower payout will definitely make all numbers negative. @BrightSilence @Bryanm @Alexey @john
More exactely, they said the netork is to big for the current storage needs, but you miss the fact that the storage needs are increasing constantly. So I understand that they want to reach the best balance of storage offer regarding storage needs, that will slowly grow with the demand. So stoping the nodes enrolling is not the objective, but the good balance of space and demand.
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This issue has been acknowledged by Storj and will be fixed, but the issue on GitHub listed it would need a bigger refactor than just changing the setting. It won’t be profitable long term and anyone who exploits it now ends up with an unmanageable amount of nodes.
You will. We got held back returned when the stefan-benten satellite was decommissioned as well.
One of these is not like the others. I’m just a SNO.
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I know the diff. I just want to get your opinion because you know much more than me.
Fair enough. Allow me to wildly speculate then. 
I think with the current payouts and prices, they are right around the break even point on unit economics alone (edge services excluded). Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Basically, they stopped the bleeding that would come from scaling up customer usage at a loss.
This will allow them to go hard on acquisition without the dark cloud of increasing losses hanging over their head. Long term, that’s not how you get a profitable business, but short term, that actually helps a lot. The reason is that there isn’t enough scale at the moment to become profitable as a whole to begin with as static costs are just way too high compared to even revenue as a whole. And because of that, going for a slight profit margin would just be a drop in the bucket at this point.
Furthermore, there are opportunities for them to make the network more efficient. Tuning the reed Solomon erasure coding settings could allow them to lower the expansion factor, meaning every GB stored by customers would require less GB stored on nodes than it does now. With that they could gain a profit margin without having to lower payouts further.
Additionally, competitors are starting to raise prices. I don’t see Storj following suit any time soon because again, gaining a small profit margin right now is a drop in the bucket and acquiring a larger user base is at this stage much more important. But this may allow them to raise prices too in the future.
I’d like to reiterate, I’m basing this on public information and adding in a lot of speculation. We don’t have full information to draw conclusions like this. But right now this is kind of how I see it.
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I would like to add, that another reducing has to come. Data size is very inflationary, 1 TB now is not like 1 TB in 1990. If Storj would success in its business, they could decrease prices slower as if they success will not be so great. Our HDD prices and internet connection prices (for given MB/S) should go down with decrease of value of the TB.
You’ve basically summed up (more or less) the lifecycle of all the previous “sharing economy” endeavors. Ex: Lyft, Uber, Sidecar, AirBnB, Turo, etc…
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Thank you. So I think everything will be fine in short term. And by short term I mean 3 mo. Because I remember they said that their goal is to gain profit at the end of this year so maybe another payout reduction will come in Q4. Then I have 3 mo to think what to do with my hardware after GE. Enjoy guys.
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@nyancodex Thanks for the question. Right now we don’t have a definitive answer. The process we are going through is we are undergoing an experiment to help us find a supply / demand, and an income / expense balance. With each change we make we are planning to monitor and evaluate to see if we have obtained an acceptable balance. If we have then we will announce that and let the community know that we do not anticipate any further changes in the foreseeable future. If we have not achieved balance then we will make another incremental change (likely much smaller than this most recent one) and again observe. We see this as an iterative process that we will follow. Given that we just announced a change a few days ago we anticipate at least 2 and maybe several months before we make a decision about if we need to make further adjustments.
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To be clear, we don’t “want” the network size to reduce. We would like the network utilization % to increase. That doesn’t necessarily require the network to reduce. In fact we would prefer if it didn’t but that we instead brought on more customer data. The reason we would like high utilization rate is so that Nodes are more fully utilized and SNOs make more money per TB of capacity they are contributing.
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Storj’s pricing changes appear to be having an impact. We are now down to under 22.2k nodes.
US has currently slipped to 4th place. I’m sure that will change again and likely US will go back to third.
https://storjstats.info/d/storj/storj-network-statistics?orgId=1&viewPanel=452
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Well … we must also consider the exchange rate of the dollar, in some countries a dollar is worth more than in others
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You mean the dollar is worth $1.50 in some countries?
In some countries a dollar is worth a cup of coffee instead of 1/4 of a cup.
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I mean that in countries whose exchange rate with the dollar is favorable you earn more. I am European, a dollar is worth less than a euro.
Well, it is more complicated than that. In fact, it is worse than you think. Not only do you get less euro, your euro can’t even buy a quarter pounder.