Right, forgot about the auctions. Last time I checked most of these servers were more expensive then the new ones, so stopped looking 
A necessary question: Has a similar plan of salary/revenue reduction by 30-90% been proposed to all Storj employees/investors (including yourself John)? If so, how many of them have agreed to such cuts of their salaries?
-atom
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It doesn’t matter whether the roll out is gradual or sudden. As soon as it is confirmed that the SNO payout decreases have been agreed upon to happen and have started to happen, I will start the process of graceful exit on all my Storj nodes that qualify for a graceful exit.
-atom
2 Likes
You’re comparing apples an oranges here.
as I said above, they choose the easiest way for them by pushing the difficulties to their providers(SNOs). But what we can do? Nothing.
However if you run your old node in the Storj advocated setup without redundancy and your disk fails then you’re doomed.
Did some math. Roughly:
2x 4TB: pays for disks in 3+ years, then just gives scraps each month = not worth a hassle at all
2x 8TB: pays for disks in 3+ years, then pays for internet = it’s not nothing, but it’s not something either
2x 16TB: pays for disks in almost 3 years, then pays for internet and maybe a gym card = better, but…
All the above based on:
- max proposed amounts
- no fees and taxes (don’t want to waste time figuring it out now)
- no energy cost increase (lol)
- disks get data without interference (no /24 limitation)
- everything “just works”
- 4TB bought used, 8 & 16 new
Add in some maintenance time or disk failure and it just collapses. Can do more in-depth calculations, but at this moment I think I’ve spent enough time on something that may just be like a ball and chain.
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I hope Storj is aware that this can turn into a kill switch for Storj. I am still figuring out if this is viable for me as SNO but it looks really really bad.
A lot of time has passed since you have initially announced changes to the economic model but you have also asked what signals would SNOs require so that Exabyte scaling is possible. Well with these payout amounts I don’t think it is.
I really wished Storj would have started the changes to the economic model on their own responsibility rather than simply pushing the problem to the SNOs. I don’t see your suggestions for price increases or technical optimizations and I fear with that new payout you will see higher node churn, higher repair cost and at the end more centralization than ever with less nodes. A minimum node with 500GB will never be interesting with these payouts.
So what I would like to see from Storj:
Changes in cost structure
- Tune RS settings as proposed by @BrightSilence to limit repair
- Work on the incentive structures to keep old nodes on the network
- Work on the incentive structures to limit repair due to exit without graceful exit
- Decentralization of repair service
- Decentralization of Edge services if possible
- Remove test data or at least start paying less for it
- Incentivize customers use of native integrations
- Limit free tier (Timed Trial only, delete unused accounts, none or limited gateway services) unless user is high prospect. Maybe there should be a harder distinction between “personal” and a “business” account where the business account comes with higher price but gateway services included.
- Limit use of token where required. Gateway costs are always $. So if a customer can pay by token for that even with a discount this sounds like a disadvantage for Storj.
Generating more revenue
- Increase price to $5 / $10 (Storage/Egress) per month. Rather apply discounts for fitting customers or customers with huge data demand if necessary. There have never been better times for a price increase as prices go up everywhere. If you are too scared to scare existing customers away with that, make price change for new customers only.
- Charge for gateway services. It is very understandable that Storj DCS low prices can only be achieved if the customers use the low cost decentralization structure. If customers want centralization then they have to pay the price for it. Not the SNOs!!! The SNOs are not at fault for those incurring costs. They deliver their job as they should.
- Develop use cases that could justify higher prices. Let me link to one Wasabi example: Pay-go Pricing FAQs - Wasabi, they charge $10,99 for their “Surveillance Cloud”. I made the suggestion to Storj to look into this market years ago. There would have been plenty of time to develop similar cases.
- Technical certification or certification for legal or other specific compliance can also justify higher prices and bring more customers. Why is there no ISO, DIN, TÜV, GDPR, HIPAA, CJIS, FERPA, MPA certification until today?
- Specific data storage requirements like geo-fencing (but also other use cases like specific distribution of pieces) could also justify higher price models.
- Maybe even to create new sources for revenue stream like value added services or different support packages.
12 Likes
I think the payout cost for TB stored should be higher than $1.50/month and then fudge the egress cost structure from there. It is difficult to predict exactly how much bandwidth you will have each month so providing more value from the TB stored makes it more predictable for the SNOs. Bandwidth does cost so it shouldn’t be free by any means but I’d rather take a hit on lost profits from bandwidth vs the actual storage requirements.
Lowering both the traffic payout and the storage amount I will probably stop hosting but I would stick around if the TB/month amount was slightly increased while lowering the egress payouts so it makes sense for STORJ as a company. They need to do what makes sense for them to be profitable but they also need to make decisions that keep their SNOs happy because without the SNOs they don’t really have a viable product. It is a difficult balancing act for them but I hope they actually listen to all of our feedback and make a smart decision otherwise it could very likely backfire.
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As you can see even the upper range of those proposals give people few years of ROI just for the hardware, not to mention if it breaks or maintenance time.
It’s not possible to think about the future of this, if new payouts will give you basically 0 return. You’re gonna basically be losing money for running nodes. Let’s say you have a disk that needs 3+years for ROI. You run it for 2 years and you’re very unlucky and it breaks. and now what? you don’t have the data to keep earning pennies and you don’t get it back. Which means you just lost time and money. After this I would feel pretty bad… Wasted money and time and I don’t even have money to get another disk in that place… these proposals are joke.
I have a question, how did you came up with those lower proposals and have you even tried to do the math to see what are the expenses of running a node with that kind of payout? Or just tossed them in here to make the upper proposals not look so bad?
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Without the SNOs they don’t have any product.
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Can we use Storj clients and satellites software on-premises to create our own network?
Maybe it’s time.
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@john
Also where is this in this model:
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A wiser decision would have been to stop accepting new nodes when Storj had reached the number of SNOs deemed appropriate for their business model.
100% agree. First step = stop new nodes from entering (create a waiting list)
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Absolutely concur on this. For me there is no alternative, with a reduced pay I will leave.
I see people are catching on to the fact that there’s to many nodes running here’s a fact for everyone and think hard about it.
We the SNO have created a problem for storj and think hard about this you know who you are.
There’s 2500 wallets but there’s 22500 nodes running scaling up the amount of nodes for yourself so you can take over the network has consequences and the actions of this is the reasons why storj has to change their prices because of the greed of trying to squeeze the max amount of money you can, cause you have access to tons of hardware and have deep pockets. To me this already seems like centralization which is bad and storj is trying to force people to scale back down. But the problem is now your gonna loose the real SNOs who want storj to succeed because they can’t afford to keep running the nodes. But the big players well it’s hard to say how many out there are running massive farms and how the prices will effect them.
That said good luck squeezing the max amount of money you can in the future gonna be whales against other whales.
Also storj is a fault here cause they want to see big numbers and it’s easier to advertise it instead of trying to control it and ask for forgiveness later.
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I think you’ll find it’s pretty hard to make me sad. It just makes your comment a little meaningless. I believe I was clear about where I made assumptions and why I made them. We’re all just working with the data available to us. And if you think there’s any better data out there or I’m overlooking something, I’d love to learn. But without more useful feedback, I’ll just ignore this comment.
How many different /24 subnets? This data is probably not published, but it would be interesting.
Running multiple nodes has been the recommendation - one drive = one node (instead of using RAID or whatever to combine them into one big node like I did).
However, why does the node count matter? I guess if there were fewer, but bigger nodes, the operators would earn more per month even with reduced rates and maybe have fewer reasons to complain, but the “decentralization” of more, but smaller nodes was what Storj was after.
Well it does matter because these nodes do not run in the same subnet. People have gotten around this from the start.
It’s one thing to run more nodes because your node is full but it’s another running many nodes on different subnets. Storj just let there be as many nodes as possible they never tried to stop it.
Storj is the only one who can see how many nodes per wallet out there but my guess there’s people hosting many nodes with different wallets.
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