Welcome in Germany 
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If egress is not paid, we could put a bandwidth limit of 10Kb/s on the uplink of the nodes and free up bandwidth for porn, gaming and whatnot… 
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This post should have started like this:
“We are living in difficult times. We decided to change the payout structure of our staff, including myself. We’re cutting our pay by 50 to 90%. Now, let’s talk about the SNO’s payout structure changes…”.
I’ve accepted that my time is paid zero. It’s hobby time. But my extra storj electricity costs can not be paid by me…
I want Storj to remain viable long term, but it’s not viable anyway if it depends on me subsidising it…
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@rezt
Thanks for sharing your taughts about Storj. They need to hear feedback from potential customers also. As a curiosity, if any of your concerns whould be resolved, would you be ok if prices for customers would be doubled, in order to support paying SNOs more?
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Thanks for your words as a costumer.
I also think that Storj has failed in marketing its advantages and instead focus on price competition, while failing to notice that crushing the SNO’s will only lead to one possible result, which they won’t like…
However, let’s be fair here. The “<5%” is just not right. The “-0.5” on the storj table is the difference between what they got from costumers and what they paid to SNO’s. It’s a well known fact that storj pays more for storage/egress than it receives for that storage/egress. In that sense, storj should work to have less clients, not more. Any new client is a new liability.
Either something different is done (and you may have a few good ideas on that) or the project is simply not sustainable. But you are right when you say crushing the SNO’s will not solve the problem, I’m not even sure if it will delay the unavoidable implosion (as things stand) or rush it…
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What? How do you want business to grow without new clients (read: clients’ data)? Yes, it makes losses now, but they have reserves to cover them. Plus the changes in discussion here are to make sure that when the network scales up, it will be profitable. Whether it should be achieved by lowering payments to SNOs or raising prices for customers is another thing. But in principle they are addressing the issue of business being self-sustainable.
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This is good to know, a bit sad to see but also understandable to keep Storj going.
Hopefully this dip will help it rise higher later 
I’m making $30/month on average as a SNO and half of that is from 12TB of shards stored and would love to see a path to $50/month.
An N+1 bonus would be nice, I run my node on a NAS in Raid5(SHR) mainly for expansion should the node grow rapidly which it has… twice. The other perk is a decently faster read/write operations.
Payout modifications:
Maybe reduce the egress fees gradually?
Increasing pay of shards stored to keep the SNO engaged.
This needs some work, but add caching SSD’s to improve ingress capture rates, maybe there’s a bonus in that?
Well, the words “In that sense” do play a role here…
I’m obviously not proposing storj should have less clients. I’m explaining to @rezt that the business model is not sustainable as it is because storj is not increasing profit by increasing the number of clients. It’s the opposite. Also, I’m stating that addressing the issue by asking SNO’s to subsidise the network is also not sustainable.
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The Token Balance and Flows report that was listed that pointed out the 5% cost to SNO’s was from Q2 of 2021. The network was much smaller at that time. And that was a division of the total amount of money Storj Labs was paying from liquid assets. Not from revenue. As mentioned, SNO’s currently earn more than Storj takes in for revenue.
So, the 5% is completely misleading and not accurate. It’s a much higher percentage than that today, and it is still the fact that SNO’s get paid more than is taken in, and until the numbers are reduced (Or prices rise) that will remain the case.
Personally, I think they should remove all of the test data as quickly as possible. This data was never promised or guaranteed. It was test data, and it is costing the company money with no tangible benefit. Why hasten cash loss on this? Node operators should expect that customers will, at times, add and remove large data sets that have the potential to reduce what their storage is holding. Test data even more so. No one should expect that data to be permanent or provide ongoing revenue. I think reducing this test data down to zero while maintaining the current payout model for a while longer is a better trade off in the short term. Storj Labs would immediately reduce expenses. Nodes would be free of data that doesn’t generate any egress, allowing them to fill their drives with customer data that does. And payout prices would stay the same for a longer period of time. Better that than cutting the payouts and then reducing growth by doing the 1 to 1 replace. These older nodes that didn’t share the network with as many nodes as today would still lose most of their data, and the customer data gains would be spread amongst the much larger node pool. So, losing the test data now while maintaining payouts is a better solution for everyone in my opinion.
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Please remove test data and make free customers’s data to be expired after a period (6 months maybe).
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Maybe my brain couldn’t fully understand your message :V
Now I understand that you probably meant “having more clients means less profit”. This is somewhat correct, but we should be stating it more as “having more clients means more loss”. So then we can say “having less clients means less loss”. Which is correct, as going to 0 clients leads to 0 loss (I know, there are other expenses, but they don’t scale).
Hope we are on the same page now.
Let’s move on:
Who’s asking SNOs to do that? They cut the payments. You either fall into the group that still can make profit out of it or not. You either stay as SNO or not. It’s business, so the most expensive nodes should “naturally” fall out and more profitable builds/locations should remain. If it means that every SNO cannot make it profitable, then that’s it - project dies. It’s up to them to find the balance. It’s up to us to either accept or decline the terms.
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Well, if you work as IT and you get old replaced disks for free and also some old machines (or Rpi’s) and you get to run your nodes at work where you don’t pay for the electricity… I guess you can still make a profit. Either way, it’s still a subsidy…
I wish you luck, the network needs more understanding people like you…
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I also agree with this.
Anyone can hunt around for good deals. I picked up a brand new 6TB SAS drive that was still sealed for about $70 US. It’s not for use for Storj and got added to one of my hypervisors but the return on investment for that would take a lot less time than normal pricing.
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Hooray! They heard me, this is what I wrote about a week ago and tried to convey to everyone.
I fully support the immediate deletion of test data.
In addition to proper operation (operators can defragment, understand what channel bandwidth they need, carry out equipment maintenance), removing unnecessary trash will allow you not to expand and not buy new ones, while the losses of the company will definitely become more balanced and will allow you to allocate some time for planning and finding a more correct path .
By the way, the basket is stored for 7 days, which means that if you start deleting now, at the beginning of the next month, the place will begin to be freed up for new data.
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Absolutely. Especially for the home and even small businesses barely used hard drives from eBay is the way to go. Three months back I got four 10TB SAS drives with under 100h runtime at $85 a pop. And I’ve been buying used drives exclusively for over a decade now.
If anything, it’s also less hassle, because 1-2 year old drives are past the point of early failure (that usually occurs in the first three months), so you are effectively jumping into the flat part of the bathtub curve, all while paying less. Win-win.
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Buying used discs is very profitable only for America, even in Europe if you buy honestly and pay taxes, the price is not so interesting anymore.
And at the same time, there are many countries such as Ukraine (do not deliver at all), Australia, Indonesia, … where the market for used things is completely different.
Subtotal $189.99
We found 2 shipping rates available for 08-110, Poland, starting at $64.60.
- UPS - International Economy at $64.60
- UPS - International Priority at $114.56
This sounds really bad. Prioritizing a short-term solution to save money without solving the issue that causes the negative balance will just reduce the trust from both customers and SNOs. Not to mention the possibility of SNOs leaving after income drops and the whole situation causing token price to dump, effectively reducing the amount of reserves Storj Labs hold.
I don’t think it all should be removed abruptly. My oldest node has a very significant amount of data be test data. Dropping storage suddenly to less than half is going to cause a shock that may make SNOs pack up shop combined with this message. But at the same time, nodes are growing fast this month and I don’t really understand why this massive growth isn’t being used to remove more test data. So I agree partially. It should be removed faster, quite a bit faster. Just not all at once.
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While I agree, this is most beneficial for North America, it’s not as grim for the rest of the world (where delivery works to of course, or where is local large enough market. What people do with used disks? Throw them away?)
Taxes and import dues apply to both used and new hardware. So they are not part of the discussion.
UPS will be very expensive. (I’m also not sure about that web site. “Deals” in the domain name already sounds shady. But maybe it’s a well known resource outside of US. No idea)
Try eBay. International shipping via eBay global shipping program or even USPS is relatively cheap, nowhere near $65. I’ve sold a lot of hardware myself to international buyers and shipping was always reasonable.
Look at this one for example: Seagate 10TB EXOS X10 SAS IBM Certified Server HDD ST10000NM0226 E ~100 Days use | eBay. How much does the shipping show for you (assuming Poland), out of curiosity?