I don’t understand your point. The tokens have value. Storj doesn’t create the tokens. They were produced years ago. They aren’t making new ones. They have tokens in reserve. They use these to pay people. Everyone knows this. They own them, they have value, they spend them. They are giving them to SNO’s to pay for service.
Thanks for the transparency. Still, it’s a bit cloudy. Maybe it’s just my eyes, I’m not saying it’s not…
If you don’t mind, I’d like to see the actual numbers for the token that was received from clients and that was paid to SNO’s. Not just the net result.
Another doubt I have is related to the dollar-storj dynamic that is not clear in the quarterly reports. Storj service is also paid in dollars, not just in tokens. Employees are paid in dollars, not just in tokens. Service providers, for sure, are paid in dollars, not in tokens. Many, if not most, operations described in item “other”, are paid in dollars, not in tokens.
It seems like this report is focused solely in the token movements, while we all know that there’s another coin (let’s call it a “stable”) moving around.
While the “token report” is invaluable for some purposes, it means nothing regarding the company operations when there is another coin moving around that we have zero knowledge about.
For example, we read that you paid SNO’s 1.2M tokens more than you got from clients. But you could also have received 1T$ from clients on top of the tokens. How do we know?
You can say it’s none of my business, and maybe it’s not. But these reports show up as an argument for lowering the SNO’s income in a “full transparency spirit”. I’m just stating that an exclusive token report can not be used as an argument for those purposes. It means f…g nothing!
What will happen to current free users ? I have just used 20 GB in last 3 month. I’ll ofcourse start paying when I reach 150GB.
I think what you should do is either lower the storage amount to 80-100 GB or build a mechanism to check if same users are creating multiple accounts or not.
I created a new account for testing and nothing happened. I was expecting the account would be banned or deleted.
Thanks,
Storj Lover
Thank you for the Twitter Spaces recording, it actually made a big difference for me to listen to you guys speaking. For me, it took away the offensive appearing part of your proposal, because I belief that you genuinely seek a fair solution.
I can speak only for myself, but I appreciate very much everytime you acknowledge the SNOs contributions to this project, because my day to day reality as a high performance SNO is to frequently worry about optimal performance and preventing disqualification or other forms of sanctioning.
My 2 cents on the proposal:
I understood @john saying, the objective is to become profitable, so that the business can scale without incurring higher deficits.
That is obviously a good objective, but I think that must not be achieved on the expense of SNOs.
I think a fair solution would be if Storj Labs Inc slowly reduces the payouts until it passes through 100% of the revenue to SNOs from selling the base product.
Profitability for Storj Labs Inc should come from selling value added services. Depending on the value added service, SNOs should get an additional smaller share of those revenues too.
While the Storj-Team indeed contributes a lot of work and know how to achieve the current state of the project, it is the SNOs who bring the project to life.
To my understanding, the Storj-Team showed up to deliver outstanding innovative solutions that outperform competitors. So far you have created a very good base product to build on.
Additionally, I think if Storj Labs Inc achieves to sell the base product at a premium compared to the market, Storj Labs Inc should get a share of the premium.
I think that this solution could put the right incentives in the right places. Inefficient SNO setups are not attracted anymore and Storj Labs Inc is incentivised to create and upsell value added services asap.
I see free tier as a way to stimulate possible clients to tryout Storj network, to test it’s capabilities. So, the free accounts should only be consider test accounts, not permanent accounts. After some period, the account holder either becomes a paying customer or the account is closed. How much time do you need for testing a cloud storage solution, maybe demonstrate it to your employer? 1 month? 3 months?
Stop referencing to Storj’s expenses reports. It’s useless. They can do whatever they want with their money. We are payed for sharing our resources. This is all that is important for us. If the payment is satisfactory, we join and stay, if not, we leave, or we don’t join in the first place. We vote the payment with our space shared. We like it, we provide space, we don’t like it, bye bye. Simple. The conditions are stated from day 1: we are payed in Storj tokens. We like it, we join, don’t like it, don’t join.
The fact that Storj team shares the other aspects of their business with us, is just a bonus for us, is to increase our trust. They realy don’t have to explain everything of what they are doing and why, in other parts of their business.
And if you consider that Storj is a business, not a hobby, for Storj team, than it is logical to assume that they try to make it work and make it profitable. The basics of any business as a service provider: your expenses for keeping up the service should be lower than the earnings from customers. In our case, the customers pay for our space and bandwith + Storj’s fee. Storj survives from this fee in 20-30 years from now.
Their huge bag of tokens are just for the start up years. Imagine if they will just give us all their tokens in 1 year. We will selling them all, drop the prices so deep that we will get the same money as now in the end.
Do you realize that in 1-1.5 years there won’t be any token reserves left?
Millions of tokens from the token reserves have been sent to Binance during the last months. Of course "They can do whatever they want with their " tokens but if they sell in the dip instead of investing $ and buying cheap STORJ tokens, the long term strategy is doomed to fail.
Of course they can always refer to the Exhibit C, #13 of the 2017 Token Sale Terms.
About the free Repair and Audit, that is not a good ideea. Engress is engress, I don’t care what kind. All engress should be payed the same. I can’t verify the type of data that goes out from my node, I just have to trust Storj. And as long as “Trust no one” strategy is the base of all the good projects in cryptospace and decentralised world, I don’t have to trust Storj that the engress is what they say it is. Imagine if they find a way to obfuscate client engress in repair traffic. How can you tell?
Which is exactly why we need to resolve the profitability issue this calendar year.
If we can get rid of the synthetic data it will reduce the token burn rate - at least until the next dip.
Even if the Storage Node Operators payout was zero, Storj Labs has to pay Service Provider Payments and salaries (and bonus ). Both concepts together are ~4-5 times the current NNO.
They are selling in the dip. I really wish they have no more token reserves in the next bull run.
There is no way Storj Labs is going to be able to cover all of their expenses using storage sales income alone any time soon, even if payment to SNOs was zero.
I’m thinking additional financing will be necessary.
Generally speaking, if there was higher demand for the Storj token resulting in higher token prices, then the reserves would last longer too.
There needs to be more use cases for the token and more (external) participants to make use of the Storj token.
Which is why I said:
It would, but not by a significant amount. It is not a very large amount of data after all compared to all other expenses.
They should wind it down if the only purpose is to keep old SNOs happy. Many of these nodes are probably full anyways, so if you remove 1% of it every day the space is replaced with new customer data at a good rate.
How can you possibly make a statement like this without a significant knowledge of the company’s finances, inner workings and a crystal ball?
The Tokens flow report is not a revenue report, more like the reverse - it’s how much reserves were spent.
When you as a customer pay for the service, you will pay $4/TB/mo of storage and $7/TB egress.
So, if you will only store 1TB for the entire month, you will pay $4, but Storj paying to SNO $1.5 * 80 / 29 = $4.14
If you also downloaded this 1TB, you will pay $7, but Storj paying $20 to SNO.
$4.14 / $4 * 100% = 103.44%
$20 / $7 * 100% = 285.71%
For stored and downloaded 1TB
($1.5 * 80 / 29 + $20) / ($4 + $7) * 100% = 219.44%
So, Storj paying to SNO from 103.44% to 285.71% of Storj’s income. It’s not 5% of revenue anyhow.
And this is without repair costs (Storj paying to SNO $10/TB of egress repair, if the repair job got triggered).
It is all speculation of course. But for now the system stores around 14000TB of customer data.
Let’s say 10% of it is downloaded every month. This gives a monthly income of 14000*(4+0,7) = 65800 dollars per month, not counting free users and lower price for large customers.
Operating a business of this size costs more, that is all I’m saying. It all just needs to grow
Isn’t the effective expansion factor closer to between 60/29 and 65/29?
If this proposal is accepted, I will most likely abandon this project.