I understand that something needed to change to keep Storj viable. That’s why I started my previous topic to begin with. I even understand that my guess at what payout could be in the future may have been a little optimistic. I mentioned as much in that topic. But I am a little disheartened by the large range of future payouts proposed below that $1/$5/$5 suggestion. Especially on the egress side of things. I was really hoping these payout changes would come alongside cost saving changes on the network, like tuning RS settings to lower the expansion factor and better incentive structures to limit repair. These kinds of things would make the network more profitable for everyone involved as there is less wasted on overhead that nobody benefits from.
This part I understand. Running these services is expensive as these middleman services incur egress charges on both customer uploads and downloads. But at the moment there is little that incentivises customers to use the much less wasteful native integrations. Furthermore, these services eliminate some of the unique advantages of Storj, like practically unlimited scaling through parallelism, decentralization of traffic flows and client side encryption. They effectively reintroduce the traditional cloud storage bottlenecks.
It would be beneficial to give customers an incentive to go native by using price advantages. For example, dropping egress costs for native connections to $5, while adding a $3 cost on top of that for upload and download using these edge services. There would be no reason to pay node operators any less than $4 for egress in that case.
So what would this mean for my nodes in practical terms? As outlined in this post assuming the upper range of suggested payouts listed here, a purchase of an 8TB HDD barely makes sense any more with the current energy prices. And even with a 20TB you would effectively only double your investment in 5 years time.
Ok, well, Storj has always said we shouldn’t buy new hardware, so what about when you already have the HDD. Well in that case 4TB would be barely profitable at these payouts with my current energy costs.
That said, the cost for energy is about to drop for me, so 4TB is probably still going to be worth it for me. However, I run 8 external HDDs with nodes smaller than that. And those will likely run at a loss with even the highest proposed payouts here. This means I have have to consider shutting those down and sticking with only the nodes internal to my NAS which was always on to begin with.
Keep in mind, I’m ONLY accounting for the energy costs of running the HDDs themselves as in my setup everything runs from that same always on NAS. Other people who run separate servers for their nodes or even just raspberry Pi’s would have higher costs.
Partly this is just because of unfortunate timing during an energy crisis. But it does show that these high limits of this proposal already scratch up against the limit for profitability. And even though my setup is really energy efficient compared to some others, I’m gonna have some choices to make.
- can I still afford to buy expansion when my disks fill up?
- can I afford keeping smaller HDDs running for Storj?
- should I find a cheaper power company (yes, I should, I’m working on this one, haha)
All in all, this is partially what I was expecting. But the lower limits of this proposal seem very low to me and I was really hoping for a more holistic approach that went beyond just lowering payouts. Given that Storj still has opportunities to optimize the network to lower costs, I would argue that squeezing profitability out of just lowering payouts right now is probably not entirely fair. So I would suggest sticking to that upper range of this proposal and use the limited profitability for Storj Labs as an incentive to further optimize the network to make it less wasteful.