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I’ve earned Storj for years by renting excess hard drive space to store other people’s files. Having a native currency lets you innovate in some unique ways. M

I’ve earned Storj for years by renting excess hard drive space to store other people’s files. Having a native currency lets you innovate in some unique ways. Microtransactions are not practical with credit cards and other traditional settlement methods. The reasons not to use something like DAI are fundraising (unfortunately - crypto VCs really like seeing a token), network bloat/decentralization, and leadership risk. Your own currency is less likely to collapse by other people’s bad decisions.

rglullis 3y ago
I also run my own Storj node. It took at least one year to pay back the hard drive. Now that they are cutting down the payout for hosting, I am receiving barely enough to justify the power bill. No one cares about microtransactions, and I'm yet to see a customer who likes a product or service but refuses to make a pre-payment of $10. None of the reasons you mentioned for a token are beneficial to the end user.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  How much is the power bill, and how many watts are you using? Barely paying for power does sound like too little, but enough money to pay back hardware cost in a year is definitely overkill.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    I went to look, and I was wrong on both extremes. I've allocated 2TB. It actually took me two years to get make ~$125, when I bought disks at ~$60/TB. For the past 6 months, I've received an average of 5.8 STORJ per month, which on today's rate amount to $4/month, but if I look at the price at the time I received them it would be more like $2.2/month. I don't know the exact wattage, but given that is a oldish celeron and that I'm based in Germany, I'm guessing that running that server + disks takes ~25W, which means ~18kWh per month and given how energy prices have gone up last year (close to 0.30€ per kWh), I am actually losing money by keeping this server on.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      Okay, so you're in an especially bad situation for terabytes per watt. If I was buying hard drives right now, I'd expect 2x14TB for about $500 including tax. If that pulled in anything close to $2/TB/month then $6 of electricity would not be a big deal. Hmm, I just built a NAS, maybe I should rent out some of that space.
robertlagrant 3y ago
> I’ve earned Storj for years That makes sense, but then what can you do with Storj?
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  You can turn it back into storage, and you can sell it to people that want storage. I feel like that's good enough to establish value.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    But is there any other value than storage? If I have excess storage to rent to people, I get coins I can use to rent storage?
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      You can sell it for cash money. The important thing is not that coins can be exchanged for a product or service that you want, it's that they can be exchanged for a product or service that many people want. And you want that trade to be the basis of the price, rather than speculation.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        I'm all for Storj (or Sia, or Filecoin) managing to create an alternative to AWS/GCP/Azure, but even if they succeed, they are never going to be able to make their system operate at a lower cost of the existing commodity. I recently set up a Minio cluster with 80TB (usable, 120TB total) for ~150€/month. Storj is cheap (~3.5€/TB/month), but there is no way that Storj can ever be that cheap. And we are not even talking about egress fees. It's difficult for them to see them truly disrupting the market when their systems have by design so much overhead and middleman wanting a cut. The moment that this model starts to become a threat to the big cloud providers, they will slash their prices and then any advantage will be gone. The best I see for these decentralized storage systems is to work as a tit-for-tat backup, maybe?

rglullis 3y ago

I also run my own Storj node. It took at least one year to pay back the hard drive. Now that they are cutting down the payout for hosting, I am receiving barely enough to justify the power bill. No one cares about microtransactions, and I'm yet to see a customer who likes a product or service but refuses to make a pre-payment of $10. None of the reasons you mentioned for a token are beneficial to the end user.

Dylan16807 3y ago
How much is the power bill, and how many watts are you using? Barely paying for power does sound like too little, but enough money to pay back hardware cost in a year is definitely overkill.
- rglullis 3y ago
  I went to look, and I was wrong on both extremes. I've allocated 2TB. It actually took me two years to get make ~$125, when I bought disks at ~$60/TB. For the past 6 months, I've received an average of 5.8 STORJ per month, which on today's rate amount to $4/month, but if I look at the price at the time I received them it would be more like $2.2/month. I don't know the exact wattage, but given that is a oldish celeron and that I'm based in Germany, I'm guessing that running that server + disks takes ~25W, which means ~18kWh per month and given how energy prices have gone up last year (close to 0.30€ per kWh), I am actually losing money by keeping this server on.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    Okay, so you're in an especially bad situation for terabytes per watt. If I was buying hard drives right now, I'd expect 2x14TB for about $500 including tax. If that pulled in anything close to $2/TB/month then $6 of electricity would not be a big deal. Hmm, I just built a NAS, maybe I should rent out some of that space.

robertlagrant 3y ago

> I’ve earned Storj for years That makes sense, but then what can you do with Storj?

Dylan16807 3y ago
You can turn it back into storage, and you can sell it to people that want storage. I feel like that's good enough to establish value.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  But is there any other value than storage? If I have excess storage to rent to people, I get coins I can use to rent storage?
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    You can sell it for cash money. The important thing is not that coins can be exchanged for a product or service that you want, it's that they can be exchanged for a product or service that many people want. And you want that trade to be the basis of the price, rather than speculation.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      I'm all for Storj (or Sia, or Filecoin) managing to create an alternative to AWS/GCP/Azure, but even if they succeed, they are never going to be able to make their system operate at a lower cost of the existing commodity. I recently set up a Minio cluster with 80TB (usable, 120TB total) for ~150€/month. Storj is cheap (~3.5€/TB/month), but there is no way that Storj can ever be that cheap. And we are not even talking about egress fees. It's difficult for them to see them truly disrupting the market when their systems have by design so much overhead and middleman wanting a cut. The moment that this model starts to become a threat to the big cloud providers, they will slash their prices and then any advantage will be gone. The best I see for these decentralized storage systems is to work as a tit-for-tat backup, maybe?