I'm also into Storj only for supporting the idea and the network.
However, I don't want that the be case forever.
I've already red all you just cited. Here are my concerns:
1. IBM is already in the game and decentralizing:
https://twitter.com/IBMcloud/status/10693965767774412802. If Storj was testing the farmers so far, farmers have also been testing Storj.
I have a 2 TB drive sitting in a box and I never used it for Storj, because it
is not profitable. The stats for my node are jumping by a weird pattern,
which has nothing to do with actual availability.
3. How is Storj going to convince me and all the potential farmers
to put effort and resources in ver 3.0, after seeing how unprofital it
is all the way since ver 1.0 and ver 2.0?
The current payout cannot even cover the electricity consumed by the hard drive itself.
It is not fun to be online 24/7 for pennies.
4. How is my node supposed to be high quality, when they say: "don't invest
in hardware, because we cannot guarantee profitability"?
5. How a Storj node will be fast enough to compete with other nodes
and at the same time "anyone can share their hardrive and make money out of it!"?
6. Is there going to be a storage tiering system? Eg: fast, normal, slow
storage? Why dropping slow nodes, when you can use them?
7. How a consumer grade hardware will be used for Enterprise class service?
Flash storage is the new norm for service providers.
Thanks
I'm only replying with what I know from following Storj blogs and community.
1. I think that is positive, the more players in the decentralized cloud space the better, surely each player will have their own benefit and their offering will differ. It will be better for end users as it brings more competition to the space.
2. You are relying on V2 stats, which don't yet reflect the new V3 network has it hasn't launched yet for farmers, to be called Storage Node Operators in V3. We should wait and see how it goes when we are able to try it out. Save your 2TB drive for when you will get given the opportunity to try the new sharing software. In the meantime register for the waitlist, I did and received a survey to fill in with minimum requirements.
3. See .2 above. Also I believe once V3 software is released there will be more stats to go by to allow potential contributors to make a better, more informed judgement on whether to jump in or not.
4. That was the case from Test Group A up to Test Group C including V2, we should see what the minimum requirements are for V3 once they are clear and defined and publicly available. I'm also looking forward to find out more.
5. They made it clear there will be different waves of invites for people who registers for the whitelist and fill in the survey, that will determine who gets invited first and who later based on their setup and performance as well as previous (V2) performance if people provides their node ids. There will be high end node operators and lower end ones.
6. I do think there will be different tiers over time, I didn't mean they will be dropping slower nodes, I meant they will drop lower performing nodes. So uptime will probably be one of the main factors influencing "reputation", together with bandwidth. If you fill in their survey you will see all the questions they ask about your nodes and the requirements. Based on that you will end in the first wave of invites or a following one.
7. Yes I agree, however data centers from major cloud players are sometimes miles if not thousand of miles away from end users, sometimes in a different country altogether, so even if you use SSDs in a data center maybe the distance from the actual data may not make it as fast as if it were in close proximity. In Storj's case, so long as there are plenty storage node operators and the network is widely distributed, you may have better data speeds because you may be getting the files from your neighbour or somewhere local.
I have been supporting Storj since its inception as you can tell I'm a big fan. So I'm confident the team is in the right place, has the right people and partners to achieve their goals. It's just a question of being a little bit patient as early 2019 comes we will all know better.
In the meantime check out their latest roadmap to keep an eye on what's next and when:
https://storjlabs.aha.io/published/01ee405b4bd8d14208c5256d70d73a38If you want to have more precise answers than mine I recommend joining their official community at
https://community.storj.io where plenty of support agents and team members will be happy to help.
