Update Proposal for Storage Node Operators

Encryption is a tough nut to crack there. Clients will send and receive unencrypted files from gateways (obviously still on an encrypted connection). You don’t want decentralized nodes dealing with unencrypted data.
And changing the workings to do encryption/decryption locally will negate the drop in replacement nature of the current S3 gateway as it requires more client side changes. At which point you might as well focus on native uplink integration to begin with.

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I agree that native integration are the best way, but if client prefer not encrypted connection it is his choose. Byt some simple encryption can be done on the fly in brouser or phone.

The auctions on Hetzner work the other way around. They start high and will drop by about 2€ or so when the timer reaches 0. So it is a race in the opposite direction until someone takes the deal.

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You do as you wish @BrightSilence. The model you are using for making your business assumptions is extremely simple. The Company is on the market for a few years. I guess the models used there are probably very sophisticated, the number of scenarios and variables significant. Those are the Company’s secrets and there is no way you can obtain this data for additional analysis. For me, the most worrying out of the info provided here so far: i) it seems that the marketing campaign related to free accounts did not bring expected results and ii) I got a feeling the business model is still drifting towards the perfect competition scenario. I really took a look at your spreadsheet a few times, so many thanks for making it public, it is very useful, however, again, I do believe it is simple. Somehow, I like the general idea that stands behind this Company. Even though, I think that the offer is not quite ready yet for a prime time (product still too complicated, communication channels not quite ready, target market not fully defined). However, again, I really do think that the Team is very committed to make it a success and I assess the abilities of the CEO as rather being very high.

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I will try to summarize my current situation without emotions, with pure facts, just for me and Storj to know, when the project will be feasible for me as SNO. All costs are storj exclusive, simply what I will not pay, if I stop as SNO.

my current setup:
storj capacity 54 TB (30 TB filled)
storj exclusive setup cost 1200 eur (HDDs, some redundancy HW)
expected lifetime 5 years → 1200/(5*12) = 20 eur/mo

current running costs:
electricity 6 eur/mo
extra internet connection speed (faster plan for storj) 6 eur/mo
VPN running cost 14 eur/mo (unlimited data speed and data rate)

total running costs:
46 eur/mo

What is the minimum payout to make it worthwhile to invest my time taking care of this setup long term? Around 50 eur/month for current setup, so minimum feasible payout for me is around 100 dollars for 54 TB setup. By this I mean the payout when it is 50:50 if I will continue or not.
Big thing to consider is, that the setup can not be full long term (fill rate of new HDDs after old ones dies). So I am not able to estimate payout per TB, because important to consider long term is:

  • how fast can new node grow
  • what will be held amount on new node
  • what happens when two new nodes has to be started (two disks dies at same time)

I will wait for announcements regarding Storj staking and /24 subnet limitations, after that I am able to estimate, if it is feasible to continue or not. It is around 50:50 now, I believe.

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Ah thanks a lot, I didn’t know this. But seeing that it was last updated 2-3 years ago and it’s a third-party wrapper does not really convince me to prefer this over the hosted gateway. Also the installation is much more complicated. It looks like I need to install C-compiler, the GO-stuff and libuplink…
Seeing this, for a developer it’s much easier to just use the hosted gateway.

And it seems like these (outdated) third-party wrappers only exist for python, php, rust and nodejs. What about all the other popular languages? Especially in the mobile app development I think it would make a lot of sense if STORJ would provide libraries to interact with buckets directly.

Yes exactly. And that should change in order to become profitable.

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I don’t know much about edge services but is that possible to let them do it by themselves if they need it? I mean Storj just provide the software for people who need it, they can setup it somewhere and do it by themselves?

not everybody get taxed

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yeah, they don’t care enough above developers which they should. They expect everybody to implement it using uplink cli which is really bad. Glad to hear somebody think the same.

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They reduced the staff by a 12.5%, so yes, they also made some cuts on their side, which are by far more painful to do and probably cuts much more money than the one spent on SNO payouts.

I do not have the details - not working with or associated with Storj Labs - but it may probably came with some reductions in other areas, not only SNOs.

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I also took an initial look at those third-part wrappers a few days ago. I do a bit of Julia, havent seen it on the list so as Julia has good integration with Python directed myself there. But it was not quite encouraging seeing the repos are not endorsed by Storj, that they are quite outdated, and that the documentation was not quite there. I put it away for now because I am busy with other things currently. Plan to dig deeper on this hopefully in a few days’ time. I was also hoping to find a direct integration with GitHub Codespaces, something like Tailscale provides but so far was not able to find it. I have to admit that also I was hoping to find containers that would enable me to jump quickly onboard, understand the ecosystem and do some very simple development tests with my free Storji account but not sure if such a thing is being provided. Apart to docker I was also interested in podman. Well, I know, it’s almost the same thing but there are sometimes important differences, especially when you take into account SELinux policies (I am not an expert on this but if this is not true, I guess @arrogantrabbit could possibly correct me). Also took a look at K8s and OpenShift integrations, was not able to find it so far. Well, I have to admit I was considering suggesting in the forum, Node Operators section, that maybe we as the Community Members could create a website like linuxserver.io but strictly dedicated to Storj but it would still be a third-party integration and I am not sure about monetization strategy, so I restrained myself from doing so.

I’m really speechless, but if we’re going to talk about this graph, please tell us, and for this we, those who put the net at all, have every right to do so, what please the cost of the item “Other” includes.

In German there is the word “Vetternwirtschaft”, that’s what it looks like to me here.

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I don’t think Storj inc will go through with this proposal. They’ve seen that all of us would quit instantly. I guess they will need to jack up the prices.

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This would lead to payouts dropping by 50% to 75%!

I was thinking of expanding the array in NAS soon. My node is currently taking up 8TB and I have around 3TB free.

Instead of buying a new drive for my NAS, it will be more economical for me to shut down my node and recoup the space. This may be what you want, but thanks for the notice.

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(post deleted by author)
(don’t want to participate in this discussion because posts are deleted without notice)

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why not try All in one price? 20 dollar per month for a standard node

Hello,
so far I have seen that no one has said that they are happy with the proposal. Not even with the maximum proposal.

I see a lot of people saying that the biggest factor is energy prices and for them it only makes sense if they cover the energy prices and if they buy a hard drive that they want to get the money back for it before the hard drive dies.

We all know that it only makes sense to pay storagenodes less than you charge customers. So no dreaming about high numbers.

I see some possibilities, but Storj needs to decide which direction they want to go.

I think repair costs can be reduced without anyone caring, so I put them in parentheses.

Option 1:
Follow your proposal, which would mean using only hardware that is running anyway.
Storagenodes receive:
$1/TB storage
$5/TB exgress
($5/TB repair)
Here the big question is whether enough people would do that, or whether everyone would just leave because they say it’s just not worth it.
The next big question is whether this would make it possible to scale to exabytes.

Option 2:
Price increase.
If Storj raised the storage price from $4/TB to $6/TB or $7/TB, it would be possible to pay the Storagenodes maybe $2/TB for storage.
For $2/TB, it would be okay to get $5/TB exgress and $5/TB repair.
Customer pays:
$7/TB storage
$7/TB exgress
Storagenodes receive:
$2/TB storage
$5/TB exgress
($5/TB repair)

Option 3:
Offer multiple tiers of storage.
Low storage, high bandwidth. Example backups.
Customer pays:
$5 storage
$40 exgress
Storagenodes receive:
$1 storage
$35 exgress
($5 repair)

High storage, low bandwidth. Example Video streaming.
(I struggle with the values here, these can certainly be optimized).
Customer pays:
$20 storage
$6 exgress
Storagenodes receive:
$15 storage
$2 exgress
($5 repair)

Option 4:
Marketplace.
Anyone can set prices that cover power consumption and return on investment before the drive dies.
Customer can set prices they are willing to pay.
Storj gets 5-10%.
The market takes care of the rest.

Option 5:
Storj buys disks and servers and builds data centers around the world. But here you are in direct competition with Backblaze and have no advantage like parallelism, speed, scalebility.

Option 6:
Overclocking method.
Decrease monthly payments to storagenodes by 5% until storage usage is 90%. You have found your lowest price. If you want more storage, you have to pay storagenodes more.

Option 7:
Venture rounds. Backblaze also makes losses because they want more market share. At some point, they may have to raise prices too.

I see its drifting even more and more, the last post of me in this thread … and … let the force be with us. LOL

Their token has taken a bit of a hit today as well. Maybe a SNO sell off?

Please, let’s move salaries off the conversation.

Those people are investing a lot of their time in the project and they get paid for it. We don’t know their terms, if they had reductions or not.

Most SNOs do this as a hobby to get some pocket money and Storj always said that SNOs should use used hardware they already own, so no, it is not the same as people’s salaries.

This kind of comments are not good for a sane conversation and they are trying to compare apples and oranges. Please, lets focus on the economics and how it affects us, not other people.

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