Can Storj share what percentage of the production data is free tier? And what percentage of that is probably abusers who will leave as soon as it won’t be free? So we will have a better understanding about the real state of the network.
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I honestly do not know why storj hasnt put a stop to this abusing the free account thats probably costing storj alot more they need to pay. This should be the first thing they change is limit the free account to 25gigs or less. No other company offers 150gigs free.
We don’t know what percentage is abusers or legit users. People are using the service. Is “use” abuse? We would have to identify who has more than one account, by limiting them via CC or Phone, etc. Then we would have an idea who is abusing the system.
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Okay, and what percentage is the free tier, meaning user isn’t paying for it at all?
Potentially slightly off-topic Idea for using Test-data:
TLDR: Use Test data mainly for nodes verification.
Current Observations:
- Test-data was used to simulate larger surges of data and test reliability and performance of the network
- The above tests are mostly done and are not needed anymore. There is enough customer Data to replace most Test-data.
- Because of that Plans are to reduce Test-data. I approve of that.
- My newest node that is still at the beginning of vetting is getting most of its data from the US1 Satellite which seems to be the production one. (If my understanding is right that testdata is only on some of the satellites)
- I assume that new nodes have a pretty high chance of going off after only a short time as they are just testing out the network and seeing how it works and if they should do it long term.
Ideas:
- Give nodes larger chunks of (or only) Test-data that is used to test the reliability of the node.
- Once the node is vetted the Test-data is slowly replaced by the real customer data.
- Do not repair this Test-data. It is just Test-data you can always recreate so no need to use Egress costs to repair it.
- Maybe even pay less for this test-data? (As long as its then phased out once the vetting is completed and is not sitting there causing a satellite to be full while still having test-data). This includes storage payout, Egress and Repair payout.
Effects:
- You will now use Test-data only as a sort of cheap verification tool of node reliability
- You will not keep paying for Test-data longterm as its only used during the vetting process
- You will save money on repair costs of all those new nodes shutting down very soon after creation.
Requirements:
- Testdata will have to be spread out across all satellites to make this work.
- The Network would have to be able to differentiate between Testdata and Real Data.
Overall I do not know how much impact these new nodes that quit during vetting actually make and if such a implementation is financially sensible. But seeing as the network makes way more copies than it needs and only repairs a segment once a lot have already failed this might reduce the total need for repairing data as more files might never reach that low of a segment count.
I don’t have that information.
I’m not sure you can isolate test data in a way that could apply separate rules to it versus other data. Such as not repairing it. Such filters among the data may not exist. I would certainly think if the testing is finished, repairing test data is a waste of resources and money and that they would have stopped it from repairing if they could.
I don’t think they are looking to do anything that complicated here. Test data is, for the most part, pretty old so only older nodes would be impacted significantly by the data loss. Since this data isn’t pulled on for egress, it doesn’t really produce much income otherwise. Replacing it with customer data is better, but of course, that replacement data won’t be 1 to 1. I would imagine, it will be spread out among all nodes, so newer nodes will gain more than older nodes that carry test data. But this is going to be replaced as new data is added, so I don’t expect it to be a dramatic loss or gain, rather something that slowly happens over time. Just some nodes will see their data go down and not up.
Purely depending on whether or not we see a lot of attrition of nodes when the final decision is in on the numbers. If we lose significant number of nodes, the nodes that remain will gain a lot of data if they have free space available.
Maybe if someone can look that up and eventually present it on the Twitter spaces, that would be great. Or some predictions about how many data will probably leave the network as soon as it won’t be for free.
And also what is the borderline ETA you are planning to put the new, not yet agreed pricing into an effect - is it by June 2023, by the end of the year etc.
The reason I’m asking is we have some monthly expenses to run the nodes and based on that we have to store certain amount of data for it not to be an expense for us, which in my case I’m just starting to approach. If cancelling a free tier would mean we would loose let’s say 50% of that, then it would be a problem for some of us even before lowering the payouts.
And by this I do not mean it shouldn’t be cancelled. Myself I’m storing backups on Storj for free, but I’m 100% willing to pay for every byte I have stored and that should be the case for everyone.
Thank you.
A lot of discussion happens both in the company Slack, as well as in meetings I am sure. I am not in every meeting, and I’m certainly not in senior executive level meetings. (Maybe one day!) So, I don’t have that info, but what I can say is that this is a proposal, and that it’s open for discussion and then I believe they will discuss things and figure out what work needs to be done, road map that, and then determine when they will announce the formal changes. I am sure John will talk about some of this in the coming Twitter Spaces meeting. But as he mentioned before, this is not something they are going to just drop like a bomb, there will be plenty of notice and time to plan around it.
time
tīm
noun
- A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.
- An interval separating two points on this continuum; a duration.
- A number, as of years, days, or minutes, representing such an interval.
I believe it will happen sometime before the end of 2023
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But being realistic, is there any timeframe estimated for this?
It would be nice to know if it is estimated to be in a couple of months from now, or if the changes will take longer than that (but before end 20223 
)
I’ve already answered that there is no decision yet on what they are doing, this is a proposal. I can’t give you a time, I don’t think John can give you a time. They have to decide what they are going to do, and then there are going to be some changes that need to be made to the payout scripts, any relevant documentation, possibly the node dashboard that estimates earnings, and a variety of other internal documents, spreadsheets, and the like. Assuming they plan this out, then they will have a better idea of when it will make sense to cut over to what the new economic model will be.
As of right now, I have not seen anyone talk about a date, other than before the end of the year. I haven’t even read someone hint at a date.
I would assume that it would not impact the most current payout, and likely there would be a payout gap after they announce the rollout strategy. That’s a guess on my part, but considering they would have to update the dashboard and such, and communicate these changes out, it will take some time. I also expect a lot of node operators to show up after that payout day who either are running an outdated version of the node software, or never check the forum, to be asking a lot of questions. For those SNO’s, it may go off like a bomb, unless Storj Labs sends out an email or adds details to the dashboard.
So, no date. Maybe John will talk about one in the Twitter meeting. But I think when they announce the final decision on the numbers, they will likely also announce the plans for when they will switch.
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This hashed probably been hashed about before by smarter people on the thread, but I think the costs of being an SNO are different for each member. And with reducing prices, I think you’ll get different operators dropping out in different regions with different capacities.
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Electricity cost is the obvious factor, needed to keep the drives spinning. Decreasing payouts may cause more nodes to drop in high electricity cost areas (Europe, California, etc).
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Bandwidth costs. For some users bandwidth is free and unlimited. For others, there may be a fee like $30 per month once over a terabyte. For others it’s a price per GB or TB. Reduing egress payouts could cause some nodes to drop out entirely, and others to throttle to very low bandwidth.
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Sysadmin cost. Franky, as a home user, it is kind of difficult to get storj up and running well, it takes a lot of time. And that time is regardless if the node is small or large. So a lot of smaller node operators may drop off sooner.
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new operator impacts. The new operator profitability experience is kind of a joke between the held payouts and the long time to fill a node. A new operator should know what kind of pricing they are a getting into. But reduced payouts combined with the existing steep learning and profitability curve could cause a dramatic decrease in new nodes, leaving only old ones on the network.
So the effects could be highly variable, I would urge storj not to proceed too rapidly. I don’t know how much information storj has on their nodes’ distributions (capacity, bandwidth, age, etc). Perhaps a survey pushed out to operators would gather more information.
Nailed it.
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Please post questions you want to get answered on the upcoming Twitter Spaces on this thread preferrably sooner than later so to give the team a chance to find the required data before the Twitter Space is scheduled.
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How about in the first post?
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Updates and Live Q&A Twitter Space March 15, 2023 @ 2:30pm ET
The incentive would probably only have to be slightly bigger than the cost of sysadmin’s time to set up and maintain Gateway ST. If you say it’s indeed half an hour, and assuming a customer performs 100 TB of egress monthly, the breakeven point would be at around ~5% of discount?
It would probably make sense in Europe, but not in the States, latency too high. And IIRC the US1 satellite has the highest egress. Hetzner is pretty unique with their reliability and bandwidth offer.
I’m in!
Wrong thread 
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Fair. I didn’t didn’t catch that it was a link and only read “this thread”. Someone feel free to move that!
Thanks, mentioned it there as well.