Hi all.
Why doesnt STORJ use the white space / idle bandwidth to generate revenue for storage node operators? Because, simply put, its not in use.
I’m mulling over things, I’ve got a node running on my PC with 5 TB allocated, I’ve read about things “going quiet”, I’m not considering moving forward with this, it doesnt look optimistic.
If this is “mining” then surely this equates to having a graphics card/ASIC with a cap on it for some obscure reason outside our control?
Hi @JimboSlice, StorJ is not mining. If you want to waste electricity, bandwidth and free disk space then join FIL.
This is not mining.
So when a taxi driver has no customer in his car, he should drive around aimlessly to create revenue for his company? Which he pays for from his own pocket? I don’t really get what you are proposing.
Hi, I was going to mention that, you mean filecoin?
If i was a taxi driver (my father is) and I had no customers, and driving around empty would earn me revenue, yeah I certainly would drive around earning revenue… Why sit there doing nothing?
Yeah Filecoin, that seems to use resources unnecessarily.
StorJ by design has low buy-in for node operators, recommending no investment up front, just reuse of existing hardware. Only using resources when required.
Don’t you consider it a bit of a turn-off? Speaking as a miner (I mine all sorts of coins and trade) we only look at the economics of things that land on our doorstep, we’d only get closer to a project to help out by being more involved and on a promise of more materialistic incentives, now and in future.
I mean, you’re stating “waste electricity, bandwidth and free disk space” - it seems that it could possibly be wasteful to go and buy a dedi and join it up to the network, on the basis that it could possibly get disqualified and reputation is lost, back to square one… That’s before realising that the box may have been running at a loss after numerous months of building up the reputation.
I’m thinking that my PC isnt suitable for this job… A dedi would be required, more bandwidth and virutally limitless transfer, free electricity, no girlfriends/kids unplugging it, hired hardware with no strings attached…
Given all of this, you say filecoin is more suited, would you never opt for changing the schematics of the V3 network to be more incentivised?
If you need to buy anything to justify joining, then this project is not for you. It’s made clear that StorJ do not expect or want users to spend money to take part. Their goal is reliable low cost decentralised storage.
The network is already incentivised… to keep costs low and barriers to entry super low.
You make it sound more like a fun thing, than a profitable venture?
And let’s say you had to pay for that revenue yourself? How about that?
That sucks, because Storj nodes are intended to tun on hardware you already have. But maybe it is suitable and you just don’t know? What are the machine’s specs?
Not at all.
Yep, that is indeed needed.
Yep, or you should at least teach them to plug it back in again 
Again: running your first Storj node should be done on hardware you already own.
Specs:-
2 x 512 GB nVME
2 x 1 TB SATA3 SSD
1 x 2 TB SATA3 HDD
1 x 10 TB External USB3
Broadband: 10 mbit upload, 50 mbit download.
I’ve allocated 5TB on the external.
“Yep, or you should at least teach them to plug it back in again” - domestic violence is frowned upon in the UK …
I’m testing things out on my PC, if it turns out profitable then i’d go major, and i’d move the payments to another wallet that i use for trading… But i just dont see this being fruitful.
I’m an infrastructure guy, a big techy actually - you’d see me get an OVH box, throw ESXi 6 on it, RAID 5 it, then spin up a few VM’s to spread the work out a bit, put some network IOC policies on it and harden the boxes up, put some availability monitoring on it as well…
But the message I’m getting here is: it’s not worth it, go to filecoin.
IMHO this is what they are doing. A big share, if not most of it is test traffic generated by Storj Labs.
Out of curiosity how much did you expect to make from 5 TB?
Let me show you a suitable ‘PC’:
It is a Odroid HC-2 and I am not kidding, I am running a node on it.
I guess most of us hope that finally network usage will increase. There are certainly some big customer required to make this worthwhile.
Well since Storj can be run on something as “weak” as a Raspberry Pi 3 (or better) with an external USB Drive. Barrier to entry is a LOT lower than filecoin which needs a relatively beefy setup to generate ANY profit.
REMEMBER Storj is Resource utilisation NOT mining.
You have available resources (i.e. empty drive space) which can be used by people wanting to have their file storage on a secure decentralised network.
This sounds just about fine.
And that is where you go beyond what is needed for a Storj node. Firstly, you rent a server upfront (which Storjlabs could do theirselves if that was the point) and expect to still make profit. Second, renting some crappy VPS is of course counteracting the idea of decentralization.
Storj is not mining. Real customers use the space to store their files. Customers pay for that and some of that money goes to us.
Though I think half of the data on my node is test data generated by Storj themselves.
Still, a Storj node on a single IP has a rather low ceiling for now. You won’t fill 100TB and won’t saturate a 1gbps connection.
On the other hand, since Storj is an actual service and not just mining, the amount of money node operators make is somewhat more stable than what miners make, especially mining the less popular altcoins. The server I use for Storj uses much less power than a CPU/GPU miner would and hard drives are cheaper than powerful CPUs or video cards.
I just use my own server. I use that server for my own stuff as well, since it now has a lot of free space.
Hi Stob,
From a very different perspective this whole mining part is weird. It makes sense in DeFi as long it is not ASIC mining, because their centralisation scheme will be opened to new disruption up to the point that they need to eat themselves keeping the level, that being said it doesn’t make sense for Storj.
Consider regular hosting, e.g. for projects with serverless functions, attached to Storj. The real charm would be to contribute server capacities at a lower entry level than the current and to utilise the equivalent capacities in turn on tardigrade, in between redundancy as well as end-to-end security, no money making or losing or bet on something unknown. Simply a better service than AWS or Azure at lower costs, because that whole Seattle overhead including stock market expectations would be shared by all Storj/Tardigrade participants no matter on what the current hosting scheme relies, although having Linux in mind. I checked SIA for example, as they somehow appeared more appropriate to the open source world, unless they again are not only somehow depended on Filecoin, too many broken links and whatsoever, all with a good intend but a poor execution, now doomed into the dependencies of rising or falling crypto valuation. We will see how that new journey turns out.
Totally when multiple SNOs have said 
Sure its not mining per-se is it, I knew this, we refer to it as mining because we’re after the loot… To get the loot, we have to host a node and some proof of work has to be completed, but we’re not being automatically rewarded by the network.
The actual economics behind storj nodes, is more of an allocation on the etherium network, and STORJ tokens are issued, they have a current market value, they are subject to transaction costs, but these tokens arent actually mined are they, they have been created in a pool and they are being issued to SNO’s.
Anyone know then how many STORJ tokens are being held back and how many have been issued?
You’ll want to look here -