/biz/ - Business & Finance

OP, could you explain what each of these means to people like me? As if we were 5 years old?

>>2258630
Marketing can't save you in the long-term if the design is inferior. This is a market where maximalism and network effects play a strong role.

>>2258657
No on-blockchain storage contracts and choice to instead opt for the pay-as-you-go model.

That means, at any point in time if you use Storj, you have no security about whether you are going to get your next payment, or whether the host is suddenly going to disappear.

As the host, it's reasonable to assume that renters are not going to have great uptime. They might miss payments, or if you are renting data on a longer timescale, they might intentionally cheat you out of a payment. For example, a monthly payment schedule means that I can cheat the host by a full month worth of storage, which could be several dollars. Multiply that by 100 cheating renters, and the host has a significant revenue problem. To protect themselves, the hosts need to require short hosting cycles and even then there's no guarantee that their storage contracts will persist for the duration specified in the contract.

The host also has nothing holding them to the contract. If the host gets a better offer - say, 10% more money - the optimal decision for the host to make is to drop the existing data and to take the contract worth more money. There is nothing in Storj that prevents this behavior, and there are no financial penalties that can be levied against the host to discourage this behavior. The network is relying on the good will of hosts to not leave.

The potential for fraud is big. I strongly advise against touching a business with that kind of business model unless they find a way to fix this.