These are two very different use cases. Netflix did that in order to get rid of latency and peering bottlenecks. While Storj could help for the latter, it won’t solve the latency issue. However, for downloading games, latency doesn’t matter and it’s all about throughput. If steam had a native integration, it could just use Storj without CDN in order to download games from the network directly and it would be capable of serving most games at high speeds (peak demand for a specific game might still be an issue until dynamic scaling is implemented on the network). So yeah, one of these cases could be a great fit for Storj.
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16 months after joining as a node operator, my setup only begin to feel profitable. If the proposed pricing was to be adopted, I would stay as a default bitter decision. But I would leave the instant I could imagine a better use of my hardware.
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i phrased that poorly, its the 1.9mil Storj tokens in the other services category in the StorjLabs Q4 2022 token economics report.
vs the 0.5mil tokens paid for SNOs
so yes it certainly can’t be 4x and i’m sure a lot of other stuff is included in that, such as test data cost and whatever.
maybe we can get StorjLabs to elaborate on what the approximate cost is of the edge services / gateway
because whatever that number is, would indicate if moving most of the gateway traffic to a SNOs cluster gateway solution would be a way to move more earnings towards the SNOs which could host such things.
this is one of the reasons why Storj DCS isn’t directly comparable with stuff like Backblaze, AWS glacial and other similar backup solutions.
and why the past excessive lowering of customer costs for Storj DCS services wasn’t a great idea, something which SNOs will soon be paying for with the new proposed payouts.
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Ahh, ok. Thanks for clarifying. Would have been nice to have that data. I was hoping you found something I missed.
I don’t see a way to solve the trust issue here. Customers need to be able to trust any gateway they use and nodes are inherently untrusted entities in the Storj network.
ah right that makes sense… hadn’t thought of that
I think the only reasonable way is to charge for the use of the gateways in addition to the normal prices. The point of Storj was to use the cheaper storage and bandwidth of nodes. With the gateways, Storj might as well just store the data there, because now they pay for ingress and egress of customer data if the customer uses the gateway.
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Don’t know if it’s worth mentioning it, or perhaps I’m looking at this too simplistic, but if I’ve read correctly about how the satellite infrastructure works, is that it is possible to scale horizontally (cluster of servers) for one particular satellite no?
Well, dedicated servers hosted by Hetzner has unlimited traffic for servers with 1Gbps network card at a relatively cheap cost (the AX161 beast as an example for a price of 145 euros per month). I don’t understand (nor have seen a number on paper) why the S3 gateways would cost so much that it’s becoming prohibitive to scale up the demand.
Edit 1:
Or if we don’t need that much processing power but just a big fat bandwidth, we can go even cheaper but with the same bandwidth per server.
snorkel, Bravo! exactly, the "mantra" of "use what you have" is obsolete, by design!
@snorkel Bravo! exactly
if You pay for renting that “hardware that is running anyway.”
You instantly making incentive to expand hardware, to be paid more.
So ppl buy used HDD for STORJ EXCLUSIVELY to add to theirs setups.
Or even the whole setup to run them.
AND even if not, with money got from You,
they expand existing hardware for them and for the storj both.
So You got to understand that, actions make a reaction,
Any money for the “hardware that is running anyway.”
making ppl want more of that money.
So and to expand and expand, as much as that money allows.
If You think, You gonna just cut the money by half,
so the ppl will be back to using “hardware that is running anyway.”,
Then no, ppl will not use STORJ at all then.
Like many noticed here before,
don’t want to repeat, they explained very well why.
Too little reward, for the users effort, for resources (space),
and for wearing “hardware that is running anyway.”
And one should NOT share a HDD with Storj node, just not optimal.
The HDD should to be only for Storj project.
But do what suits You best.
It should be profitable even for small operators.
By small operator i mean, all You need is to put minimum a HDD, dedicated.
Either by some raspberry pi, or adding a HDD to Your home server setup.
Effort just has to be small ENOUGH, and easy to make a new Node Operator,
so the network gain power.
To people in STORj:
You are not another hosting company, that HAS to be careful if it charges enough for each GB, because it is very limited by the size of the Internet connection in the facility.
so USE it for Your advantage!
Use for Your advantage, what makes You different.
or You won’t break through the hosting market ceiling.
So proposition is:
payout to SNOs:
$3-4/TB for storage filled
(for bandwidth, it depends)
Offer to Customers:
$3 to $4 per TB for storage
$0.2 to $1 per TB bandwidth
That eliminates the high bandwidth cost for Customers,
so eliminates economical barrier to use STORj.
And making it unmatched for any traditional hosting competitors.
Also no obsolete centralized technology, what for, Your not one of them!
$0.2 to $1 per TB bandwidth is small?
How about from 5% of traffic of the entire internet!?
Or from 10-15%+
How fast You can take over the market with this offer?
Details, click to unfold
You can offer flat for everyone, or threshold.
$0/TB if 0 - 150GB/month
(150GB would be $0.03/month, i don’t know, if should be free,
user would need to load some STORj to the acc!
Would be incentive to get STORj from the market, good for price.)
$0.2/TB if 0 - 10,000 TB/month
$0.5/TB if 10,001 - 100,000 TB/month
$1/TB if 100,001 - infinity TB/month
The less TB, the less $, because those are starting business, that needs every penny.
And big traffic, presume, are able to pay finally.
So You can adjust prices later on to piss them off, like everyone does.
I would like it to be flat for everyone.
But later if You need to rise for big ones to $2 or $3,
You will have to for everyone too (small ones).
Or introduce those threshold then, and just rise for selected usage, when You need it.
Also with threshold, You can pay SNOs, for egress too,
from better paying ranges.
If You getting $1/TB, pay SNOs $0.2/TB
Just an example.
Come F*CKING on,
You have a hen laying golden eggs,
and You about to butcher her to save on food she eats.
In this plan:
Customers want to use STORj, because its offer is unmatched.
The more customers use STORJ, the more HDDs are filled,
and SNOs would want HDD’s to be filled fast to get money.
Payout by storage gives stability, predictability of income,
because no one can ensure the egress.
And frankly, there are no storage, and no egress anyway, because no customers,
under current offer $4/TB storage and $7 bandwidth for them.
And bandwidth is the true power of SNOs and STORj, the decentralized internet connections!
So use it as it should be.
You are not another hosting company, that HAS to be careful if it charges enough for each GB, because it is very limited by the size of the Internet connection.
And Energy prices in Europe are doomed to go up and have crisis.
Limits for energy are being put,
like in Poland, basic limit with $0.22/kWh price is now 2000kWh for a year
You pass that, prices goes 2 times more at minimum. (1 USD is now 4,47 PLN)
So You need to pay by storage.
No fake egress needed just to pay SNOs.
You can JUST pay.
Also Fake egress is waste of resources as @vovannovig is hammering.
And makes just confusion for everybody for whats really the networks usage.
Eliminate it!
This plan also:
Entangles SNOs increase with Customers needs for resources.
So the Customers come, SNOs provide Customers, that regulates SNOs quantity,
if HDDs filling fast, SNOs adds HDDs faster (as a new node) or new SNOs come.
If slow, then they don’t add, and some SNOs quit.
The more customers, the more it’s visible to Prospect customers,
and more they want to becomes one.
Also no need for any custody, held for 12 months,
or partial payment, in fear that node will disappear.
if SNO disappear, he will not get it’s monthly payment.
It’s counter intuitive to disappear if You want money!
It’s simple, and it’s easy, SNO gets full pay from the start.
And he won’t get it, if he quits. Simple story.
No playing around with some silly “gracefull exit”.
You can keep it, if You need it.
Just make it as additional reward.
Like SNO has 3TB storage and wants to quit?
Quit with grace, and get e.g. $9 more, or just quit and get $0 more.
Some will just quit, and so what?
Some quit now as well, network didn’t collapsed.
But it MIGHT collapse, if You cut SNOs payouts.
i explained more in length here click me
It also addresses the /24 ip limit problem,
eliminating SNOs die off, at HDD failure,
Because SNOs will have money for HDD replacement, no matter what the egress is.
@littleskunk, click to unfold, about cheating the approach by restricting upload
So in paying for storage model, i described, STORJ should check if SNO is giving enough upload speed for the amount of TB he stores or even want to store. But not just a speed test. Data from real performance. Can satellites know in what time, what sized pieces are transferred? or determinate it somehow, so STORj can know the real speed in action? and if that falls below some point, average, for last e.g. 24h …
if SNO assigns e.g. 18TB to the network, should have some reasonable big enough up speed, he shall be informed before, what are the requirements.
if real performance shows SNO doesn’t have it, SNO would be informed, and some action need to be design for that.
For example if You assigns with 18TB and really your pieces goes with 10Mbps upload max, that’s too slow, either You rise that somehow, or get penalized, paid less per TB storage, or something else.
Just some Anti-cheating mechanisms so ppl won’t just cheat.
Notice, You could eliminate VPNs imitating another location with this, because cheap ones, rarely got more than 20-30Mbps upload, and making STORj bad latency. No more nodes siting in data centers, imitating real user, and stopping decentralization.
SNOs still should have options in config file to limit monthly TB bandwidth,
and
to limit requests per second.
So the connection won’t saturate, making internet hard to use.
You see this is whole new approach, but i believe it’s critical to take it, to prosper,
And the details how to execute it, should be figured out.
You didn’t responded to my previous message to You,
i think this here is shorter to read now,
and You can see, it address all 3 points You mentioned in Your previous post.
- Customers will pay more than SNOs gets for it. Solved.
- Can be free accounts, just if they don’t pay up to 150GB, SNOs don’t get paid for that too.
SNOs have a lot of bandwidth to give away. But You have to somehow make sure it is not abused, like someone said: let add customers phone, or credit card. But that i don’t like, because i like no knowledge, no KYC, especially not right from the start. When i need to just upload something for someone fast, STORj comes handy. And if someone uploaded up to 150GB backup once, up to now, it should be there free for ever. "Lex retro non agit " Or You just limit it in time for testing, from now on, and after e.g. 3 months time out, pay us. Or, there is no free accounts from now on, and traffic is $0.2/TB from first byte. That would be $0.45 for 150GB stored, for ever and Armageddon resistant, and $0.03 for every 150GB bandwidth. Solved. - Test data elimination. No need for such test data as it is now, just to pay a SNOs. Solved
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I strongly suggest that Storj does their very own homework before - to quote @John -
grinding their SNOs to a pulp.
Suggestions on cost cutting, revenue increase and even marketing and targeting customers have been made. Many of them.
I fear that the proposed lower ends of the range ($0,75/$1,50) (storage/egress) will not work for me. Operating nodes at a loss without prospect of positive returns would mean to shut them down immediately even without graceful exit. To me it looks like that with these low proposal node operation is only viable at scale, which will lead to fewer larger nodes and more centralization. Because with smaller nodes your earnings will not be going anywhere.
For now I cannot tell what my actions would be regarding the proposed ranges but quitting node operations completely certainly would have to be seriously considered. It is becoming clear that the Storj mantras to not invest and to use only what you have are going to be no longer true for a viable operation.
Payout proposal
| Storage | $1,5/TB | I strongly speak against lowering current storage payout price because if a node is full egress drops significantly and the SNO is basically left with the storage payout. This makes it less viable to run smaller nodes. Also storage costs seem not to be the major issue. So $1.50 is and should remain the absolute minimum. It should rather be raised than lowered which could open additional room for lowering payout for egress. |
| Egress | $10/TB | For regular egress and repair traffic. Personally, I would be even willing to waive the repair fees for Storj, however it is true that if there is no price tag for it, there is no incentive to use it economically. |
Alternate option
| Storage | Egress | Repair | |
| $2 | $2 | $2 | My calculation claims that this could work, yet this would have to be verified more thoroughly. This payout scheme would reflect one idea that I had in the past, as to why distinguish between egress and storage at all but also puts the focus on reducing egress costs as this is where the actual economic model fails the most and causes biggest losses. |
I would even support some kind of this. data is loaded and deleted all the time so if you have bad connection you will net get enough data to store.
I see it today, I have about 100-130Mbit of Ingress but storage amount grow slow, because some old data is deleted all the time. As it is Object storage you cant change file, here, only upload new and delete old one.
This mean if you have bad connection you will not get lot of data.
in my case i have 250 TB of tada.
3x250 will be 750 a month. in this case i will even agree with 0 Egress payment or some minimum like 1$ per TB
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$3 with an expansion factor of 2,7 turns into $8,1 storage cost per TB for Storj.
Even with an expansion factor of 2 it would be $6.
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I didn’t want to make an offtopic, but @john mentioned that part of the issue with elevated costs is that Storj is paying to provide free edge services.
Given the point of that those cannot be run by SNOs, the next question should be why are they so expensive and how can it be reduced (if possible).
I know (and all of us should) that paying 20$ per TB transmitted while the customer pays 7$ is not feasible, but reducing costs in other areas may get us the upper limit of the proposal 
This could be also something that make clients think about hosting it themselves. Sure, for some clients this may not be reasonable and Storj may make an exception if the deal is good, but it should not be free by default.
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my 2 cents…
Some SNOs have very reliable and stable setups.
Some SNOs have very fast internet and really cheap bandwidth
or both…
How about letting us choose the payment scheme we want? (And with some conditions?)
A draft example:
Plan A.
Pay more for bandwidth, pay less for storage
- condition - Stricter uptime requirement (maybe a minimal 90% uptime?)
Plan B.
Pay more for storage but less for bandwidth
- condition - Minimum speed required (eg: > 150 Mbps up and down)
- Storj can perform speed tests between several Plan B nodes to verify that they maintain high speed all the time (and pay peanuts for bandwidth tests)
Plan C.
If the node cannot satisfy the selected plan, fall back to this plan and Storj will pay a reasonable amount (but MUST be lower than the above two options)
Plan D.
Diamond Node - Granted by Storj
Paying high prices for both storage and bandwidth
Conditions:
- Super reliable and stable (eg: uptime > 96% in x years)
- Ultra-fast internet connection speed (eg: more than 500 Mbps up and down)
Storj can identify node types and distribute storage pieces among different types of nodes while achieving BOTH stability and high-speed efficiency. (and also cut costs but SNOs are still happy… maybe?)
We SNO also need to fight for what we want. (Try to qualify for Plan A or B or even D or … go home? 
)
Of course, Storj internals also needs to make some changes, especially the edge services
(but I think this is beyond the topic and should not be discussed here)
As for how much Storj should pay for the different payment schemes
I have no idea 
open for discussion
Clearly said sarcastically to mean the exact opposite and followed by a statement saying Storj doesn’t work without node operators and they intend to keep running a node rewarding for node operators. Quoting this without context is not ok.
Well, yes, but unless they can be reduced to 0, which I doubt, there should be an incentive for customers to avoid using them. More than there is now, as clearly current incentives alone don’t work.
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If I had to guess, Edge services probably gets used the most by free tier users, because of the desire to share links, and this makes it ripe for abuse and heavy load when abusers write scripts to make multiple accounts, string them together and use them as a larger repository or a free Chia drive. Storj Labs should consider possibly keeping the free tier, but require a credit card if they want to use Edge services. This would reduce abuse and likely reduce edge overhead significantly. (There are alternatives to credit card as previously mentioned, like requiring phone numbers, whatever the choice is here, reducing the abuse would be helpful in reducing cost)
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I would support this as well, similar to how BB does it. Requires a credit card, but we can set billing limits to prevent accidental bankruptcy (pun intended 
)
Wow. That should be taken into account and put some solutions to avoid such waste of resources 
It will not fix the issue with SNO payouts being much bigger than customer pricings, but it will for sure help to reduce those edger services costs - which are several times more than SNO payouts as exposed before.
Yeah, I wonder if the TB of edge service bandwidth is more expensive than what the customers pay for it (even if nodes were not paid)…
Another way would be to limit the speed or limit the bandwidth to some small value. Good enough for testing or the occasional file share, but if you want to utilize the account fully, you need to use the uplink or self-host the relevant gateway.