Yep, we are working on the Unionpay option already.
As of this morning 2 of 3 nodes are now gone and no GE. So, screw your penalty theory @littleskunk (referencing another thread from long ago)
I wish you and your family safety and well-being. I hope you will find a suitable relocation option.
As for funds for relocating, you can try to sell less important PC hardware which you have on hands - it will trade for quite a good sum on second hand at the moment.
By the way, I am actually living in Russia as well. Looking for the relocation options too, right now. I have tried to contact several consulates of EU countries for some help and waiting for their answer. I think I will not be able to relocate before closure of international flights, but I am sure there will be other ways later as well.
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I am not sure which thread you are referring to. Since it is a long time ago the information might be outdated anyway.
As an alternative to graceful exit, you could also take the hard drives with you. You have around 27 days to get your storage node back online and still get unsuspended later on.
Another option would be graceful exit itself. In the last 2 weeks, we have increased the repair threshold for safety reasons. The additional repair work has one side effect. If you run graceful exit now it will not transfer the pieces that have been repaired recently. So graceful exit will finish surprisingly fast.
I am not up to date on the current payout sanctions. Just in case one possible workaround could be to finish graceful exit now, copy node identity on an USB Stick, bring it back online from a different IP. Not pretty but it should work to claim your graceful exit payout.
Due to the slow start these days, nodes generally have about $10-$20 of held amount after 9 months, if they start now. After 15 months, that is then cut in half.
This is of course just an estimate, but I try to make it as accurate as possible. It currently underestimates egress a little on new nodes, hence why I said between $10 and $20.
I can imagine $5 - $10 held amount not being worth the hassle on larger nodes.
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Penfold, I wish you and your family safety as you navigate this. This war is truly horrible for both sides. Good luck, and I hope we see you back here some day.
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Yep, at 52 years of age I will likely have to start from nothing again. And that is if we get out.
I wish you the best in getting out as well Krimarai. We are already selling stuff but to move it quickly I am finding we need to discount severely. With the associated depreciation of the rouble it means our acquired funds in USD/Euro terms remains very limited. I mean just to get 1000 USD I need to sell 100 000 rubles worth of stuff now.
So far I have sold my Cisco ASA, some 10GBit DAC cables and some diecast models. To give some idea of the discounts I have some diecast that would normally retail in the $70-$150 USD range but to move them we are selling them off for about 2500-3000 roubles each.
Got a Dell KVM and 10Gibt card to list tomorrow.
But our kids of course want to eat too so the income gets eroded there since prices are higher now. Right now I am not eating to try and keep us afloat a bit longer as unfortunately my wife is also paid internationally so if this goes down we will both lose our income.
Sadly I have 4 2TB SAS drives in shipping from the USA that are now not likely to arrive or be able to get a refund from. 
The USD from those would be handy right now.
Penfold
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F*B are inspecting and in some cases confiscating electronic equipment as people leave.
I’m dead scared to be honest they will take my phone - just because they can.
This is part of it - but remember we are also now on that wonderful zksync system. So, what can I actually do with these (now severely devalued) tokens on the L2 again? The fees to move to L1 and actually cash them out would be greater than the total value even after GE and and this month’s payment combined. It is these two reasons combined that make GE a total waste of time. And if I recall you also had issues with the current held back system.
Yeah my issue was that it doesn’t provide enough of an incentive when nodes grow and has an outsized impact on young nodes that already don’t make that much due to vetting.
I think if the held back were collected over a longer period up to a higher total, that balance would shift.
But even now, you could do a graceful exit and let the payout sit. Perhaps later there will be an exchange with zksync support. But I realize you need money short term right now, so it’s unfortunately not going to help you atm, which really sucks.
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I agree with this as an idea completely. Early nodes are smashed too hard right now.
Frankly, I feel like the biggest incentive right now to not kill one’s node is just the fact that as ingress is so low and rebuilding a node takes lots of time, killing a node is like burning a bridge to never return to Storj payments. And when one’s prepared to burn the bridge, even if graceful exit brought much more money, it’s still rarely looks like worth the effort.
@penfold, @krimarai, and any other Storj participants in Russia and Urkraine… while this particular section of the forum may not be the best place, I think it would be awesome if you guys could have a thread here for keeping in touch and status updates. Maybe in the Uncategorized section. I’ve found that Storj is more than just a business/hobby (depending on your role) but it is also a community. I’m sure there are many of us that would like to know how you all are doing and if possible provide support, although it may understandably be difficult. Hoping for the best for you guys.
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Is it possible for you to access cloud services outside Russia (for instance…Storj DCS 
? Sorry if this is obvious, or impractical…but can you back up your phone contents somewhere that would be outside the reach of local authorities?
I find Arch Linux wiki to be a very good place to find lots of documentation:
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Many are now moving to Kazakhstan, take your servers and move to us 
Is is called whataboutism.
Unfortunately, my wife’s passport is still blocked. We have reduced the debt to the Government significantly, but it is not as yet finalized. And we are now paying private school fees to keep our kids out of the Government system as much as possible.
So, KZ is not an option as yet - and I am about to go through the fun of renewing my Australian passport from here. lol
I purchased two vps servers. One in Canada and one in Australia which I have configured as private vpn servers. This neatly avoids the issue where the Russian government blocks commercial vpn vendors. Both my wife and I use these extensively for our employment. Potentially my Australian vps server has enough capacity I could move my Nextcloud instance there or at least setup a duplicate.
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