Quote from: whotheff on December 02, 2018, 03:56:36 PM

7 Storj for keeping 350GB online for a year.
That sits on top of all these talks.
So far Storj is unprofitable and soon the big companies will catch up.

Microsoft is investing in Data centers, IBM is going toward decentralizing,
Prices are dropping.

When Storj will actually be profitable for farmers and cheap and good enough for users?

We are all on the same boat, with V2 (deprecated network) there were lots of low performing nodes (in the tens of thousands) with many just spinning up new nodes just to get a basic payout. So rewards were distributed to many nodes instead of fewer but better performing.

I wasn't looking to earn a profit by sharing storage as a farmer I wanted to contribute to the network with the hope that things will improve overtime.
The team also never encouraged anyone to spend money to buy resources to share on the network but recommended to use existing and/or spare hardware.

In terms of pricing Storj is already cheaper for end users according to the website and they mentioned in the blogpost above that they will have to keep their pricing competitive to make it a viable alternative to main object storage providers. The focus is on enterprise customers and developers rather than end users but any third party can build tools and alternative cloud storage solutions for end users. They have partnered with several open source platforms that are already testing the V3 network. Another thing that is very important to mention is that Storj's biggest seller is providing decentralized, client-side encrypted storage where data owners can trust that only they can access their files and no one else.

However, when V3 is released for farmers there will be "reputation" introduced and Storj will only allow farmers with good reputation. Reputation will be affected by the new rules for being a farmer and minimum requirements so that should drastically improve payouts for good performers and drop off the network low performing nodes. This will first make the network more resilient also make fewer people able to earn rewards for contributing to the network.

So I strongly doubt that regular folks will be able to make a living with Storj in the future unless they have resilient nodes, good bandwidth and upload/download speeds and I think it's for the best, I rather have a solid alternative to mainstream providers that allows for total privacy and security as well as high resiliance and performance.