Why do you believe customers always have a usecase that would not be perfectly even around the clock? Btw my grafana dashboard doesn’t show perfectly even traffic.
Beside that no we don’t manipulate the numbers. We splitted customer and test satellites for a reason. This has not changed.
I would downgrade my internet connection and try to get as many used space as possible without worring about the download performance for the customer. I will have to optimize my setup for cold storage at that point. I don’t think the current customers will appreciate that.
Same for the idea that download traffic should be free. I am fine with that. I will adopt to the new incentive. Customers will just have to wait longer for the download to finish.
How would be $0,75/$1,5 (storage/egress) better?
My nodes average about $4/TB accounting for egress, however I have plenty more bandwidth that’s not being utilized. It neither makes me more money or cost me any more to have. At least for the time being, we’re facing cuts to some degree. The proposed cuts will at minimun bring those earnings down to under $2/TB. So… I don’t think a flat $2.50 to $3/TB stored while also giving Storj a huge selling point to attract new customers is an unfair compromise. SNO’s would also have a steady predictible income and all the crying about Storj increasing egress would be moot!
Now, I say per customer packages to obviously limit this being abused and allow for things to change in the future as other outside factors change. Any overages would obviously be charged at a fair rate and should be paid to SNO’s as well. Please explain to me how that’s in any way worse than what’s been proposed by Storj here?
to attract big players we actually have what to offer:
);its certainly a good point… if egress doesn’t pay one could simply have near infinite data and no real egress speed… which would be bad for customers…
but egress earnings also go quite low when the data gets old…
so not that huge an incentive for relying on egress
already…
ofc we all want to earn more, so its good that an egress incentive exists and a good argument for that it should keep existing for sure.
In many cases this probably doesnt matter much since most connections people have are already the cheapest options they have and Storj still works fine. If it did become an issue though, easy. Storj can impliment a speedtest into the nodes. The more bandwidth you have available the more data your allowed to store. Take it a step further and “cold” data can be stored slightly more on slower connections while “hot” data on faster ones. Sure it would be a little work for Storj to impliment this but isn’t that kind of the point? To continue to do things to better optimize your product and create incentivizes for customers to use it?
Trust me when I say… currently the ONLY people who MIGHT be paying for a higher tier internet plan for the sake of Storj nodes are the whales. NONE of your average users are paying more for their internet specifically for the sake of running a Storj node!
And if we simply waive repair costs, Storj could more easily shuffle data around as needed to best optimize this. That way people with slower connections aren’t at a major disadvantage. Of course the network could know ahead of time using speedtests what nodes have what speeds available and distribute data accordingly in the cases where Storj knows ahead of time what customers will use a lot of bandwidth based on their bandwidth packages. Everybody wins!
If the above is implimented, this probably wouldn’t be necessary.
Or the next lower bandwidth option is so bad that you simply would not do it. This would be true for me here.
That doesn’t work. The satellite would have to perform these speed tests. I am able to modify any speed test that would be executed client side. Even for a satellite side speed test I would modify my node in a way that the speed test always has fastest possible speed while slowing down all customer downloads. You can try but I am confident that will not be a big problem for my node.
If download traffic is free why would anyone want to store hot data? I expect all nodes in the network to optimize for cold storage.
Call me a whale than! I am already looking into downgrading my internet conection 
Do you really think that this is gonna make a real difference? I mean every free account is getting a discount of max $ 1.65 per month. Care to share how many free accounts are there?
Paid accounts also get the same discount. → You can take the total number of accounts from the public endpoint.
Yes, but then the proposal is to eliminate the discount for the paid accounts also?, that is not what @alexey said
Ok… but as a potential customer:
Sure, but my current provider has multiple professionally run high security datacenters that already guarantee a high level of reliability. I’m not really that concerned with being nuclear war resistant at the moment. But I don’t even fully understand your platform. Your datacenter consists of uncle Joe and aunt Nikki, grandma, and some gamers in their moms basements running on Raspberry Pi’s…?? …and disk drives scattered all over the floor that the cats use to keep warm on a cold night? (I know that’s not accurate for… well, probably most of us here anyway… just making the point of how other people might perceive it.)
I already have one of these with my current provider.
Well come back to this one…
Cool, but you need that more than I do otherwise your “datacenter” would be impossible.
My current provider is pretty up front about their pricing too and since I’ve been with them for a while now I know what to expect.
Awesome, faster is obviously better, but isn’t the latency higher? And do I really NEED it? I guess it really depends on the cost and other factors.
Wow, that’s cheap!
Going back to “simple migration”…
Ok it’s simple, but this simplicity comes at a cost (currently to Storj). We will probably be charged for this at some point.
Optionally we can run our own gateway. No longer quite as simple.
Additionally if we go this route we will be using a VPS to host this gateway. This now comes at a cost for both the VPS itself (probably not a deal breaker) and the bandwidth they charge. Now we’re paying for Storj bandwidth as well as VPS bandwidth which aren’t apparent at surface level. Hmm… maybe not so cheap after all.
Now it looks like you pay more for the storage than your selling it to us for? How is this sustainable? Oh, your going to cut what your paying the independant 3rd parties hosting the data? What assurances do we have they won’t just quit if they’re no longer incentivised? Furthermore, if this is supposedly a decentralized platform, why is Storj (a middleman) even involved? There seems to be to much uncertainty with this model.
From the looks of things I’m sorry to say but we’re not interested in your platform due to the fact that it’s not quite as inexpensive as it appears on the surface, and there’s no real benefits that outweigh the potential risk pertaining to the seemingly unsustainable economic model of the company as well as the uncertainty surrounding all these 3rd party providers.
Storj: WAIT!! What if we charge $10/TB stored and offer a generous free bandwidth package catered to your specific use case?
Think to myself… holy shit balls batman, free bandwidth??? 10 bucks is still less than half what I currently pay just for the data to sit there… just maybe there’s something to this whole decentralized storage thing after all. That sort of savings is definitely worth a second look, plus I can just pay my tech guy to set up all this uplink / gateway stuff I don’t totally understand. Clearly I can see how the company can still actually make money at that price so it’ll probably still be around a year from now… and I don’t really need encryption but I suppose it’s nice to have… and being nuke proof, well thats a nice added bonus. I suppose a little latency isn’t a terrible tradeoff for much faster speeds and this kind of savings and all the other little added perks.
To Storj: Why didn’t you just lead with that?!?!
So in other words to sum it all up… Storj doesn’t really offer much of anything over the competition that MOST people give 2 shits about. Use the one huge advantage Storj has to give them something to give a shit about!
Even at $10/TB ist’s a good deal. Storj can skim $1 off the top for themselves (which looks much better at scale) which would mean they could pay SNO’s $3.21/TB at 2.8x, plus there can still be bandwidth that is paid depending on use cases.
Well like I said, for most of us we’re already using the same internet option we would be using even if we weren’t running Storj nodes. As it is currently, nobody except whales are incentivised to upgrade their internet plans as it. So how can you argue that these would be reduced in any way?
As for the wales sure I can see how they would LOSE the incentive at that point so ok… any overage charges should still be paid to SNO’s. How much this would account for in terms of whales is anyones guess right now but it’s still something to think about. If Storj ends up with customers like video streaming services where it’s constant egress maybe just charge a very low rate to them instead of a free package and that gets paid to SNO’s hosting more “hot” data.
I really think this sort of platform, the way it’s implimented, should have plans catered to specific use cases (at least for large customers) as the storage network can essentially be programmed all sorts of ways to be best optimized for different use cases.
Also, what happens currently if I have say 50 TB on a gigabit connection and decide to switch to a DSL connection? Would transfers fail? Would I be penalized in any way? If not, couldn’t you just impliment something like that? So if my internet consistently can’t keep up over a period of time I face disqualification or loss of income at least? Even without a speedtest mechanism?
As for the speedtest idea, at the very least it could be used more as a convenience factor for the network than a limiting one for SNO’s simply to help the network determine what nodes are best for what data. Even if someone manipulates the result to get hot data, if they end up with to much they could be penalized for not keeping up.
I suppose the mechanisms and improvements should not be discussed here. So we will get what else and IOPS need to be changed in order to understand how fragmented the disk is, etc.
If we talk about the economic model, then it should be based in my opinion on the scalability for operators, if you want to grow in volume, provide redundancy and use caching with fast channels … so that this can become a main income with the right level of investment. Even if the investment returned only after 3,4,5 years … - then the network will be reliable and the operators will be involved, and not constantly sit on their suitcases and say that they will leave the project because they have a constant income (and its size depends on the volume of the initial investments) and equipment set up and invested, and what is important is their rating (retention or other mechanisms) in the system that does not allow them to go somewhere and then just return.
Large operators can be the basis, and whoever wants to be a small operator, let them be, they will increase accessibility and geographical distribution, decentralization. But the basis must be reliable and assume the possibility of scaling at your own will.
Otherwise, no matter what the price is, this is a project that requires investment, consumes time, but to a greater extent, the operator gains experience, not money.
In general, we are talking about everything in the world here, and what will happen next we will soon see 
Probably true, however I think most have already made it quite clear that this proposal is trash so I’m not sure what further purpose this thread really has at this point. I’m trying to point out alternatives but in order to do that people need context. They need to understand how certain things can be done. Without that, how can anyone understand how something like free bandwidth packages and bandwidth paid based on use cases can be implimented and still be profitable for everyone. I’ve been wasting a lot of time in this forum… some just for shits but also because I want Storj to succeed. None of us get paid for our time here (well some might) so as far as I’m concerned I’ll post wherevers at least somewhat relevant where people will pay attention. if my ideas are shit then fine but tell me why and we can discuss it. Maybe we can talk in a separate thread about specifics, but this is related so I’ll continue to post these sorts of things here.
Edit:
I realize this might make me sound like I’m being an ass but I don’t mean it that way.
Is there any way to optimize the costs of running edge services on your end?
I could see the address is resolving from my end for link.storjshare.io are on your own IPv4 subnet. Are you running it in a cloud or baremetal? How about satellites?
I suppose that is already under control, but as someone mentioned before, if any of those services are running on cloud it would be $$$, specially for edge services which uses a lot of bandwidth.
the edge services do cost 4x the price of what SNOs get currently, but thats not really the point here… sure the edge services money could be used towards SNOs, but again that will most likely degrade customer experience.
the problem as it stands…
StorjLabs gets
7$ pr TB egress
4$ pr TB stored (this is before the data expansion factor of 2.7)
thus there is only
7$ pr TB egress and 1.5$ pr TBm from customers.
this is then to be shared between StorjLabs and SNOs
one option could be to let SNOs take over the edge services, however this would only be relevant for SNOs in a position to do so, thus the storage part of the equation still has to make sense for everyone else.
i think it’s best we leave the edge service out of the discussion, because its not really a factor that can be change much.
best case it could become distributed, so all SNOs are part of it… which is highly unlikely
a more likely case would be that some SNOs host the edge services, which just means a better payday for the SNOs involved with hosting edge services.
worst case it proves to be to complicated to implement and its a useless thing to discuss.
we need the economics of StorjLabs and SNOs to make sense for both parties.
else there is no future business for anyone involved.
changing edge services is at best a maybe.
and not really relevant to the conversation… imho
lets try to simplify and distill this discussion down to the essentials.
something needs to give for this to make economical sense.
my best guess would be expansion factor, but thats just because i’m to ignorant to come up with something better. 
I’d be out with that proposal.
If you don’t want to change prices for customers this project will be unmaintainable. Node operators need a minimum, and less than 15$ egress/1.5$ TB storage is an insult.