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). 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.

As a farmer, I would think the economics would be 1 > 0. Meaning it's better to make something off of what you have sitting there anyways.