
Former Docker CEO Ben Golub Joins Storj as Executive Chairman and Interim CEO - tomstokes
https://beta.techcrunch.com/2018/03/12/former-docker-ceo-ben-golub-joins-storj-as-executive-chairman-and-interim-ceo/
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thinkingkong
Has anyone done an analysis behind the economics of distributed storage like
this?

Im genuinely curious. At first glance I cant see paying an individual or
company ever being made lucrative enough. Its like the inverse of facebook,
where individual monetization is small but only in aggregate is the system
worth boat loads of money.

These new building blocks are facinating, but the whole model so far seems to
be “we own lowest common denominator”

~~~
prepend
I’ve “farmed” storj for about 6 months. I don’t get the economics. The payout
varies. But for 50-100 GiB I’ve gotten about $20. It’s not a direct easy
calculation but I seem to be getting about 6 cents per GiB (20/6=3.33 into
50GiB).

The model is supposed to be that you can pay to store data. But oddly, their
site doesn’t seem to allow that any more
([https://storj.io/faq.html](https://storj.io/faq.html)). That may be new. The
price last time I checked was 1.5 cents/GiB/month. This seems bad compared to
S3’s 2.3 (<50tb) or 1.25 (infrequent). Or dropbox’s .8 ($100/100GiB/year).

So from a cost perspective it’s bad for the user and doesn’t match up with io
(paying farmers 6 cents, charging users 1.5 cents). But it’s a good idea in
principle. Would work better as an open source community or non-profit
foundation or something. Setting up a ratio of something like share 5GiB to
get 1GiB would be really useful for a personal backup service.

So I’m sticking with it as a user.

