Quote from: whotheff on December 13, 2018, 10:57:40 PM

It was advertised and promoted literary as "you have free space on your laptop's harddrive, why don't you sell it and make profit!" You can watch some of the videos of Shawn Wilkinson. This is exactly what he promotes. Now it turns out, that to compete with the storage providers, you have to either come up with a miraculous algorithm which negates all latencies combined: from network lag, time difference, dropped packets, disk performance. Or hire some retired admin with old storage servers in his basement (from the above mentioned storage providers) fill them up with drives and waste a few kW of electricity for pennies.

At the same time these enterprise storage providers have gone all NVME Flash.

Storj team have to very carefully reconsider their path, becase there is zero chance to compete with enterprise storage, using someone's kitchen laptop.

I think that the only chance they have is to be a cheap alternative to Tape backup storage. Where you hold the data for a long time, but rarely upload-download it. That might work.

Another path is to convince people that decentralized storage is much safer and more secure than traditional, but that is counterintuitive and will not be easy. And then bet on security.

good luck

There will be different storage levels, and different storage contracts that node operators can participate with, but yes your node will have to be online 24/7 to have a good reputation and be able to participate.

I think the team has got their acts together and remember Storj is an object store more similar to Amazon S3 than dropbox or google drive. Third parties can then build their own versions of dropbox on top of Storj.

To note the best seller of Storj is that the data can only be accessed by the users that upload it so that in itself is very attractive, I'm sure, to a lot of people.