Update Proposal for Storage Node Operators

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573

Hi, just a quick reply to your messages @deathlessdd, @Roberto, @Pentium100, @BrightSilence , a short one, because I am really on the move today.

I re-read the initial post of this thread. To my eye it looks like: a) there is a problem with a business model causing such drastic changes in storage node operators renumeration policy or b) to said it mildly somebody is trying to make jokes of storage node operators.

What I had on my mind when referring to the e-mail addresses and network growth including /24 rule is that I was proposing to close the network for new participants. This would result in a situation when one can create a new node only when participating earier and at least to some extent being an early contributor to the network creation.

In general, what Storj Inc. is proposing has significant repercussions for every storage node operator. With time there will simply be almost no incentive to run a node. There is no other option, this is how “a perfect competition model” and “commodity markers” behave.

Open market with a perfection competition model is extremely bad for storage node operators. For Storj Inc., well, I think it is not so good but I have to admit that to some extent it is discussable. Short term it is great because as I wrote earlier, the Company is in a business model of cutting a margin, so if a turnover grows, Storj’s Inc. revenue grows as well. However, again, please do think it over from your very own perspective.

To sum up, what is the future of storage node operators, what is the path forward? Are we going to upgrade our rigs to the level “proposed” by @Th3Van or maybe even to the level like this one or just keep it slowly running?

I am in a bit of a skeptical mood today but how you can’t be if you are reading about: i) results of free accounts promotion, ii) the product, including i.e. Python SDK, iii) /24 rule, including the ratio of nodes vs number of storage node operators and the whole Storj’s marketing story, iv) audited financial statement particularly the line titled “the other”.

I like computers and the community seems to be cool and vibrant so hope to stay around here at least for some time.

574

Hi John,

There could be many reasons that Storj needs to reduce this SNO payouts.
HOWEVER, we (the SNOs) are not really paid in Fiat currency. All we get is just storj tokens which has decreased in pricing significantly. Yet you guys are cutting the payouts means less and less storj tokens. That means we are doing it almost for free and paying for your company to have distributed storages.

If it is to discourage the sudden increase in SNO numbers…why don’t you stop giving authorization codes from that ‘Host a Node’ page. Then filter out bad nodes and shut them down.

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575

I’ve just bought one. I planned to get one in half a year anyway for my lab, there was a promo yesterday, and if it still manages to earn some storj tokens before I’ll need to use it, all the better… though this is a case of an experienced SNO with an opportunity. Can’t imagine a random person joining fresh this way.

Anyway, when it will be installed, I’ll be at around 0.65 W/TB, going down from 0.8 W/TB. Yay!

S3FS is slow and its design as a FUSE file system does not allow it to avoid some problems. This
is visible even when connecting directly to AWS S3 from an AWS EC2 machine, i.e. the most favorable conditions. I’ve never seen it being used for anything but some lightweight dev work. Emulating a file system is hard work, if you can avoid it, you do so. S3 is usually integrated directly into devops or ETL tools, only then it’s solid. This is also I suggested Storj Inc. worked more on integrations. In my backyard that would be tools like Apache Camel, Apache Airflow, Django and so on, but there are tons of them.

The worrying thing though right now is that right now it’s not easy to write a compliant implementation without linking to golang and leveraging the existing libuplink code, and having to link to golang from non-golang environments is an obstacle that makes deployment troublesome.

576

Guys, here is the replay of todays meeting: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1djGXlAqDOVGZ. This is potentially extremely cool Company, much better than Mr. Travis Kalanick early startup. The management and technical skills are absolutely there. The automation of selling process should be implemented, in particular the product experience should be improved thanks to a focus on end user and developer experience (please see tailscale.com which has a much more difficult product that is extremely easy to use), individual sales airplane experience only in cases when securing a long-term clients with a minimum of at least 4 full 42u racks achievable. Units’ economy of individual storage node operators should be increased and /24 rule gradually removed (its only on the paper currently and everything works great), particular focus on improving the skills and machines capacity to be implemented (please see the programs and tactics of uber.com). Object storage market disruption strategy should be redesigned and two to three, the most promising Web 2.0 / Web 3.0 market segments studied, with product and communication strategy implemented.

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577

Nodes are paid in Storj token that is fixed to USD pricing at payout time. Flux in the market is common, nobody complains when the token prices rise, just when they go down. A lot of token value is derived from where the entire crypto market is, and that is largely driven by speculation and other markets.

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578

Are you sending any info when the payment is made? I have never got any e-mail on this topic from you. It’s a bit difficult to implement any strategy with regard to token volatility.

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579

That’s far off topic. If you want answers to questions that are off topic, I’d first do a search because this question and how those calculations are done at payout time have been answered numerous times. If you still have questions, please create a new topic.

581

So I feel much better after the Q&A. Seems like Storj really listened to the community here and are taking many of the suggestions into consideration. I’m hopeful that a good balance can be found between cutting SNO costs as well as finding ways to increase costs to customers. I really think something like a tiered structure with higher cost per TB but low bandwidth cost would be very beneficial for targeting content distribution type use cases and hope to see this sort of thing being discussed further.

I’m especially excited at the prospect of using collateral in order to remove the subnet limitations in order to host larger nodes. I believe this would help nodes to scale in a way where the reduced pricing can be offset by higher efficiency and the capacity for higher egress bandwidth utilization, as well as eliminating the costs to large SNOs currently associated with circumventing these limitations. There’s no sense paying more for the same (if not slightly worse) end result. On the other side of this, I think it’s also important to keep the current model of holding funds as this makes for a nice and easy no risk barrier to entry for new SNOs just getting started.

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583

Let’s not act unprofessional and make troll posts like this. I want to allow everyone to say what they feel about the payout proposal, but stay on topic and don’t make bashing comments unless they are constructive. I would prefer not to delete responses because we want everyone’s input. But we will if it veers too far into being off topic or bashing.

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584

Nodes are paid in Storj token that is fixed to USD pricing at payout time.

That I know.

Flux in the market is common, nobody complains when the token prices rise, just when they go down. A lot of token value is derived from where the entire crypto market is, and that is largely driven by speculation and other markets.

I am not complaining about the crypto price drop. Where are you going with this?

My comment was for the proposal of reducing payouts for the SNOs. It’s not just reduction, basically they are dropping it to nothing. The SNOs are paid in storj token. how much? that is calculated based on Fiat currency.

However, who generates storj token? They are not buying these storj tokens using their fiat currency, isn’t it?

Crypto tokens can be and are being generated based on transactions in the network. So, technically the SNOs are vital part of this network and they are proposing to reduce the pricing for egress from $20/TB to ($1.5-$5). This is insane.

If you simply reduce the synthetic data from the network it will automatically reduce the payouts. Thus it will discourage the recent increase in SNO numbers.
That’s all.

585

All the tokens were produced years ago. Storj does not create new tokens.

I think you are under the impression that SNO’s somehow mine tokens. They do not. Storj has tokens in reserve and pays SNO’s with those tokens. When they run out of tokens, it is assumed they will purchase tokens from the market for distribution to SNO’s.

Anything further on this is off topic. Please create a new post if you have questions on the tokens.

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586

Thank you so much for enlightening me on this. However, it is still true that,

the SNOs are vital part of this network and they (the management) are proposing to reduce the pricing for egress from $20/TB to ($1.5-$5). This is insane.

If you simply reduce the synthetic data from the network it will automatically reduce the payouts. Thus it will discourage the recent increase in SNO numbers.

This is the topic behind my replies.

587

I think we need to reach an agreement on lowering the amounts paid to SNOs, for the good of Storj and the SNOs.
I suggest that Storj strike a balance between what it charges its customers and what it pays to SNOs, at least for now.
A three-step plan, each three months apart, could be possible.

  1. Storage (per TB Mo) $1.50
    Egress (per TB) $15
    Audit / Repair traffic (per TB) $8

  2. Storage (per TB Mo) $1.50
    Egress (per TB) $10
    Audit / Repair traffic (per TB) $6

  3. Storage (per TB Mo) $1.50
    Egress (per TB) $7
    Audit / Repair traffic (per TB) $5

In return, Storj must do everything in its power to reduce its other costs. But we have to keep in mind that there will certainly be further revenue cuts for SNOs.

588

Abstracting from all the business topics. Thats how you presented the proposal so you should not be surprised by the reaction of the readers. Apparently all this, especially your behavior, does not look like it is about friendship. You deleted my previous post thus with this one I am copying your supervisor so he will be aware. [@john]

Very low of you guys.

Edit after the post hidden by the “Community Moderators”: Nothing to be changed here. Please see: Update Proposal for Storage Node Operators - #599 by s-t-o-r-j-user particularly the second paragraph. Cheers.

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589

The one where all you wrote was, “Very far, are we still friends?”

This thread is for discussing the payout proposal. If you’d like to start a new thread with your question, please do.

592

hi @Knowledge , I missed the live because of timezone difference, but I have a question here. Assume that I’m a big business who are using AWS S3 for all my products, my data is very huge. Does Storj have any migration process and/or experts that will help me to migrate from my old cloud provider to Storj so I won’t have to do it myself? If Storj does have it then how much does it cost?

Thank you,

593

This is completely off topic. If you are genuinely interested in knowing then fill the form on this page.

594

Lol I’m not a real big business. Just an assumption to know how Storj currently handle the migration from big cloud provider. It’s not an easy process so if you want a big customer to move then you must help them to do it.

595

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596

Hey guys,

I want to add my 2 cents :wink:

First I am really happy that there is a proposal to discuss about and not a simple announcement like it was with hold back payments because of high transaction fees in the past.

Everyone knows that there will be the time where the Payout Structure for SNOs will change. It’s simple math. It’s maybe a little earlier caused by the Crypto-Winter, but it was clear it would come the time.

To be honest it’s painful and I did not think that it will be such a dramatic change, but the biggest aim has to be that the company will survive and grow.

——

I Real love the idea of Storj and I support the project for years. I have listened to the Twitter-Space and to be honest Im really disappointed.

I think the most important think its trust. And how can we trust you if there are „other“ costs which are nearly 20 times higher than the costs for the core of the network, the SNOs?

What is about the „other“-costs? You did not answer this question in the twitter-space nor somewhere else.

And this is what makes me very skeptical about the future.

Why do you cut the costs for the SNOs so dramatically although the sum you can save is only a fraction of the costs you can possibly save with „Other“?

I don’t say that Story is a Scam, but why are you guys so intransparent?

———

Below my Numbers:

Nodes: 35

Storage Allocated: 300TB

Storage used: 135TB

Costs:

Energy: 100€ / Month;

IPs/Bandwith: 200€ / Month

Efficiency: 1,5W/TB → Heading towards 1W/TB in the Future if prices/payouts makes expansion possible.

Overall I need to get 1€/TB to work without a Loss.

———

And I simply don’t get the argument with to high storage demand and to much nodes. It simply doesn’t matter because you get paid for USED Storage not for allocated Storage. So there could be 100.000 Nodes.

What’s the problem with several IPs and Nodes? It’s not forbidden. And the Network won’t be able to scale without „bigger“ SNOs.

Best wishes

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