I might be missing something here, but since Storj Node Operators only get paid for data they’re storing and not how much they have available, how would extra unused storage increase Storj’s costs? Wouldn’t that just decrease the amount of data each node gets on average, lowering the payout per node but keeping the total payout (and bottom line) the same?

Looking at the Q2 2023 transparency report (https://www.storj.io/blog/storj-token-balances-and-flows-report-q2-2023), assuming I’m interpreting it correctly, it appears that payouts to SNOs were just under 6.5% of the total operating costs. If we use $0.50/STORJ that’s about $750K. Assuming a 12% decrease is accurate, we’re talking about $90K. Compare that to “other” which accounts for just under 72.3% or $8.3M, or a total of $11.5M (23.1M STORJ). That’s a reduction in about 3/4 of a percent in total operating costs. It doesn’t look like there is a line item showing how many tokens are coming in from customers so it’s hard to tell how that might affect storage costs vs something like S3.

Bottom line, it seems like they might be trimming fat from the wrong place, but it’ll be hard to say that with confidence unless we know what other places they’re either making cuts or increasing spending, as well as what the impacts of the July payout decrease looks like in the 3rd and 4th quarter reports.