What comes into my mind additionally is how this would look to the customer. As the beneficiary of this clearly is Storj.
So storing on the cheapest node of a selection should not result in any performance loss or whatever for the customer if he does not profit from the cheaper storage option.
Probably does not matter much. For Storj it means they send data to the node hoping they can store it for 0. And suddenly the node operator increases the the price back to 1.5.
So instead of saving money, Storj is back at the initial cost. Also Storj does not know from which node customers download their pieces. So the saved amount could vary from month to month.
Yeah, good idea. I don’t enable it for now but I’ll maybe do later, and if you give more data to cheaper hosts I’ll enable it for sure. I’m OK to host data for free for 4 months but I’d like that you use first the cheapest nodes you can. You can fill my server if you want but it is only a little server with 24 TB
But can you maybe give us an approximation of what charge it can actually reduce (I know this is confidential, but to know if it is really useful, as I thought that SNO payments were peanuts compared to the VPS fees you must pay for the satellite) (for example if 50% off data are hosted for free)?
I’m glad the Storj team seems to be coming back to life even with this bad news. Together, I think the project can survive, but I remain a bit bitter since the acquisition of Inveniam because we have had no contact with the team anymore for several months. Hopefully, this situation makes the whole team stronger than ever.
@littleskunk@Alexey i only saw this topic now, despite its up from 2 days, can You pin it somehow to the Top of forum? or other way to rise the visibility, beside im just going to set my nodes then for 0 egress.
Edit: also You would need to delay the preparation, which i see started, so satellite could get updated config.yaml data from all those nodes for this months payout, that will be not sooner than 21.08 as far i understand from the court order
I created the frist draft 2 days ago and made it public just a few hours ago. So you had no chance to see it earlier.
I will leave everything else up to @Alexey to decide. He is the expert in keeping it nice and organized.
There should be something sooner. But thats all I can say for now. I have a first draft of the coresponding announcement prepared. I am waiting for reviews and last but not least we will most likely wait with publishing it until everything else is ready to go.
I don’t want to start yet another thread arguing about the principals of being an SNO and have more arguing about right and wrong, but this seems like a pretty decent compromise to me. Everyone would get to set their lower bounds for what they would accept for their space and can adjust that based on their local operating costs, etc.
One thing I’d wonder long term is if people set their payout rate to $0, get selected heavily to fill up a node quickly, then either leave because there’s no incentive (however small) to stick around and GE or create some vector of abuse where now they have a disproportionate amount of data and revert to the standard payout amounts with data that won’t be migrated off and doesn’t naturally decay very quick.
It sounds like payout selections would be averaged over many months. Setting everything to $0 to fill quickly doesn’t sounds as enticing… if it will take almost a year to climb back to normal rates.
If it takes very long, a SNO might exit.
Then we might have:
A SNO who might have a lot of data as he advertised 0.
A SNO with very low held amount, 0
A SNO with no incentive to stay or to do GE
I can imagine that especially new SNOs will be tempted to run their nodes with a very low price tag to get as much data as possible and they don’t have much to lose yet and otherwise large portion of their earnings would be held back anyways.
Next make node selection using the price tags. Can’t wait to join the battle of the bytes. 
