Hey @omnigeeker, – Stefan Benten – Medium

Hey @omnigeeker, – Stefan Benten – Medium

Hey @omnigeeker,

first of all, this is a very in depth overview of our network rebuild we are working on!
Awesome work and glad you are seeing the improvments!

I would like to give you a little more insight about what we are planning on doing with the cryptocurrency / the ERC20 Token in our V3 network. 
As you already pointed out, it is used in the network for payment processing only, as its a utility token.
We are currently looking into good and suitable ways to pay the Storage Node Operators on a more frequent basis. Everyone agrees that having no response for an entire month is quite long.
So like mentioned in the white paper, the Satellite is accounting the payment amount more frequently than once a month (e.g. once a day). The improvement that can be made fairly simply would be to send the payments right after accounting.
BUT, there are several problems when focusing the Ethereum blockchain.
In March 2018 we paid more than 150k farmers and due to the congestion of the blockchain, issues with the local Ethereum nodes used to broadcast transactions, the process took quite some time to completion. Besides the raw time it took to get the payments done, the amount of fees we had to spend were quite high. You can read about that in an article featuring our CTO Philip Hutchins here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/10/02/creating-scalability-on-ethereum/#3d63c7e55226

That said, scaling the payment frequency up would mean to spend even more money on fees, which in contrast to the actual amount of payout is getting to a point of non sustainability.
To circumvent this issue, we are taking currently an internal test for Micropayments using the “Raiden Network”.
If you’re interested, the script/repo for that is found here: https://github.com/stefanbenten/raiden-on-storj
The first tests looked very promising and are put into this blog post by our CSO Shawn Wilkinson: https://storj.io/blog/2018/12/taking-payments-to-the-next-level-with-raiden/

The goal of this test is to achieve/create a payment system, that allows almost instant payments for free and with total visibility to the client (in our case storage node operators).

I hope to gave you a little more insight about the ways we like to improve the payment system as well, if there are any further questions, i am happy to answer them!

Best regards,
Stefan Benten
Strategy R&D Engineer
@ storj.io

Published at Fri, 04 Jan 2019 18:10:06 +0000