Yes, it’s very simple. Do not forget that STORJ requires constant growth of storage on disks, that is, you need to constantly buy new disks, spend money. The first thing I did after seeing the proposal was to limit the size of the space for the nodes at the current level, so as not to buy hard drives in a week and not increase costs. Most likely, large operators do the same.
increase prices? just a bit… 1 or 2 $
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i know this might require a lot of work and wouldn’t apply to all SNOs.
but some of SNOs would be able to take over the gateway / edge type services which StorjLabs pays a lot of money for…
it would also partially fall in line with the emerging project of custom satellites.
ofc the storage side of things still needs to be profitable, but adding more possible paths of revenue for SNOs would never be a bad thing…
obviously one would first have to determine, if that is a viable path…
but it wouldn’t surprise me if it could be…
and i for one have been looking for an excuse to upgrade to 10gbit internet 
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That was disappointing, I was expecting as least one “so you can fuck off” in your post. You have a strong opinion but nothing ban worthy
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Im questioning why you needed a burner account for this, This is a place to speak your mind I always do because I dont really care that much cause im pretty out spoken and I dont use a burner account, people need to know your opinion about how Storj is operating.
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Money Maker: Create a simple backup app that everyday users can install (Windows, Mac, Linux, Docker) that allows them to backup to Storj. Either monthly unlimited fee per device or pay-per-TB.
This, I think, is the big hole that would bring in revenue and fill up all that empty space on the network.
As it stands, the average user doesn’t want to figure out how to set up an account, generate compatible (S3) credentials, etc.
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Backup App: would love to pay for a fast, secure and decentralized backup on all devices. 
Unfortunately the post is 2y old. 
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I already expressed my attitude on this topic earlier - stop pumping SNO with test data, they need to be deleted! Only after that discuss the new pricing.
And on the topic of backup, I would be happy to test it - I have already submitted an application, regardless of the fact that the topic is old. (If I’m not mistaken, it was even included for Ukrainian IPs to make free test access and deploy advertising against this background)
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The big fish ain’t interested (yet), but it seems they have no interest in the everyday consumer market.
Their price point seems to be trying to compete with the consumer market while lacking not only a product for that market, but also a profit margin.
Their idea of saving money is cutting SNO’s pay which stomps out little guys leaving only large SNO’s somewhat profitable, while at the same time preventing large SNO’s with the /24 limitations.
Storj claims to want to achieve exebyte scale yet tells everyone NOT to buy hardware… which is the only way Storj would EVER come anywhere close to this sort of scale.
Storj claims to be decentralized yet continuously moves closer and closer to a more centralized model.
I don’t know who in the hell is running this shit show but I’m really starting to think this is all smoke and mirrors… the ol’ bait and switch! I think Storj will simply pivot their whole model, kick us SNO’s to the curb after setting up their own infrastructure, and rebrand as just another shitty centralized storage provider. I’m sorry, I really don’t want to think that but I just don’t see any other way out for them if they continue down this road. Please… anyone… post ANYTHING you can find to change my mind about the future of Storj and where it’s going because so far I can’t seem to find it. It all seems like hopes and dreams and nothing more at this point. It feels like several other companies I work with that are in oh shit mode and just trying to tread water so they can keep getting a paycheck. Please… help me to not think this way!
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So, this was inevitable but a sad time for Storj, and SNO’s alike – I can’t see a Win/Win out of this and SNO’s look like the target of this rug pull – I was kind of OK with the BrightSilence model, but never imagined this extreme.
The proposed single cost models are worse than I thought – Given world $$ inflation, and cost of electricity means in real world terms SNO’s have taken, in some parts of the world, a service pay cut already over the past 18 months. The proposed new costs just don’t make it worthwhile running a node on current Egress traffic, unless you have free energy or access to free hard drives and internet – The constant theme of use what you have, just doesn’t cover it – ROI on an 8TB USB hard drive would never be realised, you would need to go big or go home.
What is clear is that you need to pay the SNO’s fairly – this will mean Storj continuing to make a loss, while drastically changing their engineering and marketing strategy as clearly what has come before has failed. Failed is good, you can learn from the mistakes, but let’s not be calling this anything else under the hiding of this being an SNO failure and we should take the brunt of the impact and losses.
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The main issue is Storj let the S3 genie out of the box with no thought, or control on the future impact. Before S3 became main stream, as a node operator 100% of traffic was uplink… over 18 months ago I commented that over 80% of traffic was S3 gateway, and now it’s over 95% of traffic… All this has done is low ball the uplink library and kill of any innervation or development in your unique selling point. As others have said, uplink dev is dead or outdated, as a developer there is no compelling reason to spend time playing with uplink, when a few lines of code let me use S3… I fear the damage is done, and it will be impossible to move these customers from S3 back onto native uplink at a point where you can charge $$ for consultancy services, training days, dev camps, customer onboarding, support services… this is where your money is located, not on being just another S3 provider that market is saturated.
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Why do the free trial accounts not use the inbuild piece expiration feature of storj to delete data after 6 months? Could you define what future you see for these accounts, as they consume allot of storage which if you start purging would impact revenue. Everyone loves a free account, but at a time when you are looking at killing SNO payments I would sooner see these trial accounts go first.
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It would be nice to see some more tangible business case studies that are relatable – I have seen soo many helpful posts from SNO’s with target audiences, and yet nothing in response apart from “I’ve made the team aware”… The CCTV market was huge 18 months ago, its now flooded with manufacturers already entrenched with providers. The games market has been completely overlooked, live streams ? game builds (these are huge for consoles) Downloadable content, the list goes on… If as a company you can honestly sit down and agree your case studies represent the best of Storj technically, then I think that would be selling yourselves short.
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Why do you not allow “Developers” access to the TEST/Synthetic satellites instead of production ones – this is a better place for testing and play, it can also then have different economics and controls put in place and allows SNO’s to GE to opt out, or better still run a different node like you do for QA for these satellites to operate on. I would be happier seeing this dev data on a node that isn’t so important, than having it mixed in with production load and being paid the same - this again should be addressed before killing SNO payments.
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Why do you hang on to geo located satellite names ? this feels really legacy and a waste of resources when you host S3 gateways in these locations instead. Surely merging AP1 and EU1 into US1 and rebranding US1 as Storj Enterprise with full S3 edge services would be better ? This would allow you to charge for the use of the S3 gateway… Then you could spin up a new satellite with no edge services, or link sharing hosted by Storj allowing native Uplink usage – this could come with a much less $$$ tag to promote native development and get that back on track. So what future do you see for the current satellite model, isn’t it time for change ?
It can’t be cost effective, or sustainable on the tech team to maintain edge services for US1 / EU1 and AP1 and pay hosting fees – Before killing the SNO’s on cost – as above, merge all those into the new Storj Enterprise Satellite aka US1 and save on the hosting and duplication of EU1 and AP1 , I can see no technical benefit given the edge routing you do for your hosted services ? This cost saving should be made before killing SNO payments.
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I don’t understand “why” you disqualify nodes so quickly - I’ve read your papers and the notion that all SNO’s are bad and should be treated as such if they go offline for a few hours or loose a few files just isn’t the reality – given the fact that Repair traffic is not sustainable at growth, and you have to pay for it ! A better technical solution would be to ring fence, and penalize a node that is failing audits – that might be putting it into a limited ingress group, while it get’s bloom filtered to find all the data it still has available. Even if a node is going bad, if it’s able to offer up 10% of the files it still has available, this is better than kicking it from the network. As an example, take a full 4TB node with 5 million files on it – through no fault of their own, the sno accidentally unplug the Rpi instead of the coffee maker, and the node goes down unclearly causing the EXT4 filesystem to corrupt one of the mid level data directories. On a FS repair, over 1 million files are lost, however the remaining 4 million are good – it makes no economic sense to kick this node, let it be penalized, but allow it to continue serving up the 4 million files. The cost of repair on this is where you are losing far too much money, that can be paid to SNO’s instead.
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On the /24 subnet rule – it’s really clear SNO’s are finding creative ways to bypass this, VPS / Datacentre IP’s / Cloud Hosting and more – This has a cost associated with it for the SNO’s to operate, and if it was removed – then the drop-in fees might be more attractive to SNO’s as they won’t need to find workarounds.
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As others have said, your actions on the types of SNO’s you want are not transparent – I see continuous posts about how Storj wants residential users, re-use your Rpi, or home NAS, earn a passive income yet you allow Major cloud service VPS’s to be used in the network. I have no issue with this, as there are clearly professional SNO’s here who can easily operate 50+ nodes on unique IP subnets offering 100TB’s reliably, and yet this is not recognised or paid for any differently by Storj – I think this is a problem, as these commercial nodes have been the backbone of the network to allow it to achieve the current level, and now you have over 20k nodes you are prepared to allow these nodes to fail due to lack of funding. There is, and has always been, a great opportunity to engage with these professional node operators, who are clearly invested in the project, and yet they still remain treated the same as someone sharing 500g on a SMR hard drive attached with sticky tape – I think it’s time Storj acknowledges them, you might be surprised with the level of technical skills and good will on offer to host more nodes and services.
CP
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Fully agree. I would be fine with losing some held back $ to cover the repair that I then need to simply refill rather than to just get outright DQ’d.
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Dont you know they want SNOs to fail because they want less running and Storagenodes are dime a dozen and can be replaced by any potato. Were supposed to be tech savvy but we cannot use dependable hardware cause they dont want us to spend any money on hardware. They also want you to run on existing hardware thats been rundown for several years and will 100% chance of dying running on the network for any amount of time.
This entire thing is BS and its a false sense of what Storj really is because storj is basicly ran on datacenters as it stands today.
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This is an interesting proposal.
For context, I’m a relatively new storage node operator, who has been going for a few months and has 3TB stored. Haven’t posted until now, but I’ve been a lurker on the forum for a while.
My biggest frustration as a node operator is the time it takes to fill the capacity of a node. It clearly shouldn’t take years to fill up a single large HDD. So, with that in mind, I think that there’s a legitimate point being made here by @john that there is a oversupply problem on the network. Storj has tried to solve oversupply by increasing demand (slashing prices for customers), but I don’t think that’s caused enough of an increase in demand and has also put the organization in an even more tricky financial position, where node operators are being heavily subsidized.
Counterintuitively, subsidizing node operators with high payouts can reduce revenue. It certainly does in my case, because the oversupply of storage space on the network causes only a tiny fraction of my disk space to be used. Just this announcement seems to have caused 2 petabytes of storage capacity to leave the network, which means my node should receive a higher amount of ingress - and that’s actually good news for me.
However, I think it’s important to be very careful and phase these changes in slowly. I would assume that in an ideal Storj network, nodes should be distributed geographically, but different regions may have very different costs for node operators. I’m thinking particularly about electricity costs here. AWS has regional pricing, which I think (?) accounts for this. Large shocks to payouts could change the distribution of nodes in a way that could harm the performance of the network.
As a final note: I think node operators would appreciate transparency and details about long-term plans for payouts and for the financial viability of Storj as an organization. Running a node (or many nodes) requires long-term commitment for operators, and trust/transparency is a scarce commodity in this space. Given that market conditions began to turn sour a long way back, and that many operators have anticipated a decision like this coming for quite some time, it is a bit disappointing that you intend to implement these changes on short notice (a month or two). I echo the concerns of others who suggest steps be taken to inform operators that are not active on these forums.
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“Synthetic Load” haha. After so many years, a high % of the network data is still dummy data. Traffic/payouts are surely modulated by a function and now Storage, ingress and egress price constants are going down to decrease the “net network operations” concept while the undefined “other” keeps increasing. Havent seen something so obvious since the sjcx transfers to poloniex
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Bit of a moan
I’m going to have to take a long hard look at my situation as a SNO over the next 6 to 9 months.
I’m in the UK and with energy costs being as high as they are, the cost just to power my server is equal to my SNO income per month. (This time last year my income paid for ~50% of my house energy bill monthly!)
Some data:
- Node is 23 months old
- I’ve a 9Tb Node that’s ~95% full, (will probably be 100% full by the end of March)
- Energy is £0.33 ($0.39) Kw/h
- Server is running at around 110w (it’s an old AMD FX, I can’t afford to upgrade at the moment!)
- Rough maths = energy costs for my server per month £27 ($32))
- Income from my 9Tb Node = £27.50 ($33)*
(*that is if the value of the token doesn’t drop in the time it takes me to cash it out!)
Next month looks like it will be a bit better income wise, current estimate for March is £32 ($39) So even than it’s only a couple of £ to help cover Internet and zero to put towards “Wear and Tear”.
Only upside is summer is coming soon, I’ve a couple of solar panels on my roof which can cover 100% of my energy usage during peak daylight hours, but I don’t have and “feed in tariff” or battery to offset costs at other times, (I’m renting and the owners, who are the local council, didn’t set things up for that).
Even if the SNO payout changes don’t come into effect and If my energy costs don’t drop enough over the next 4 months then my descension to start a GE will have to be in around late summer / early autumn.
If the SNO payment changes DO come into effect, then it looks like I might have to start a GE sooner rather than later!
(I’ve GE’ed out in the past and came back when the situation was more favourable. So I’m not giving up on the project as such, I’ll probably just be a passive observer for a year or so till things get better i.e. crypto bull run / energy cost drop!)
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Yeah… MAAANY potatoes…! But don’t put all your potatoes in the same bag or your the bad guy!
Anyone ever see honest adds on YT?
Hey, do you have an unnecessarily stupid amount of extra space on your computer you paid good money for but never plan to use? Have you always wanted a passive income stream but never knew how to get one?
Well your in luck!
INSTALL STORJ TODAY to become a NODE OPERATOR and for the low low cost of your hard drive, a few hours a month of race against the clock high anxiety sleepless nights troubleshooting problems you won’t understand, and the inevitable loss of your important documents, family photos and sanity due to the guaranteed failure of your hard drive, YOU can make a WHOPPING $1.00 a month of PURE PASSIVE INCOME!!!
What you’ll need:
- A desire to learn new things! Hehe…
- A power hungry PC that you’ll NEVER want to shut off.
- At least half if not all your hard drive space!
- Minimum of basic networking skills a must.
- An internet connection that you also never turn off.
- A wired connection to your network, which you probably don’t have anywhere else in your home.
- One of them sketchy new crypto wallet things.
Lastly, you’ll need an unbelievable amount of patience while you wait years before building up enough in your account to get paid. But once you do you’ll have just enough to pay for the transaction fees for those shiny new digital tokens that will only ever be worth less and less as there’s no real incentive for anyone to buy them in the first place. Lucky you! Just make sure you don’t spend any money investing in this passive income stream because when we decide to do a rug pull, haha… we don’t want to be liable for your poor financial decisions.
Sorry, I’m really bored at the moment and having a hard time taking this project seriously anymore.
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I actually could picture this as an ad and the guy sounding really excited to tell you about it. At the sametime thinking what a scam this is gonna turn out to be in the future these guys got no idea what this actually is. BITTTTCONNNECT. They used the same slogon.
I can tell you 100% if they go with anything close to this proposal storj is gonna be history. The worst part of this is without really thinking about it and posted it anyways People were complaining storj wasnt profitable before this…Lol The first proposal is like a kick in the nuts and then kick you while your down. If that wasnt a low ball I dont know what is.
I lost a hard drive just the other day you think im gonna buy a new hard drive to start another node nope.
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