Instead of getting their clients to buy he token as an entry ticket into the ecosystem they’ve decided to take direct fiat payments instead. Nice way to screw their early ICO backers in favor of their late shareholders.
Hopefully Maidsafe will never do something like this. Safecoin is designed to be the entry token into the ecosystem, which you’ll have to purchase with fiat or by mining it directly.
People who’ve mined Storj so far have been locked out of their own ecosystem just like the early ICO funders.
I think we’re missing the point if we keep holding on to tokens as our sacred badge of entry. The point is that value (represented as fiat) will be moving into the ecosystem. The more you can reduce friction (send fiat to an exchange to buy token then buy storage or send fiat to buy storage) the more likely it is that your software will be used. StorjX could be used to buy storage, but keep in mind this is a bitcoin transaction at it’s heart, so the cost of the bitcoin network will decide if that makes sense or not (last time I heard a btc transaction is now $1).
The point here is they’ve cheated their early investors. They are essentially scammers and I don’t use that word lightly. The token should have been the ONLY way to enter the system, not using fiat, which basically totally devalues the token. Following their ICO, which made Storj a thing, they’ve raised money on BankToTheFuture and did a private equity sale recently. They’ve scammed their early ICO backers in favor of their company shareholders.
When it comes to Maidsafe, people should be able to buy Safecoin directly with fiat and there will be no friction. If you buy Steam credits or Amazon points with fiat using debit cards/credit cards or Paypal there’s not much friction. You’ve easily entered the ecosystem and from there it’s very easy to purchase stuff. So I don’t buy this friction argument at all.
Storj could have found ways to make the Storjx tx cheaper but they had no interest in doing that. They could have easily swapped their Bitcoin based Counterparty token for an Ethereum token and used that instead, however, their priority was to monetize as fast as possible taking the cheapest, fastest route and not giving a damn about the early backers.
There’s no market demand for Factoids. They are useless.
Maidsafe is the only project that has a solid plan for the token. All the others I’ve looked into are just ripoffs since there will never be sufficient actual demand for their tokens. Demand is symbolic at best.
They needed an excuse to raise money and they’ve done so without giving back anything of value and now that they’ve got all they wanted from people they’re ready to exit scam.
Actually factoids are needed to even use the system, you cant use the system without so how are they useless?
Even factom foundation take dollars but still need to burn there own Factoids.
Factom is def. not a scam, might still be overpriced cause the usage is minimum atm. but if they get adopted by couple big company’s the factoid price can go x10
Look… you’re preaching to the choir here. I’ve been a sucker ICO investor in David Johnston’s previous project which he exit scammed to start Factom, which was Mastercoin/Omni, which used to be THE smart contract platform back few years ago, before Ethereum came along. The Omni devs didn’t manage to create value for the actual token. To this day it’s still worthless and its use is symbolic at best, just like so many other tokens in the space.
I didn’t say it doesn’t have a use on paper but in practice its use is minuscule.
I don’t think they are necessarily scammers (ie misled people about this plan all along), though I certainly understand that view.
What this does is demonstrate the centralised nature of the Storj, and the danger of this for anyone investing/helping to build it. When there is centralisation, it creates opportunities and temptations to exploit that position.
MaidSafe have periodically been accused of things because they also hold a position of power, although I’m confident that they would not be tempted in this way and would do their utmost to carry out their plans as presented. They are always very open when things don’t go to plan and do their best to carry the community with them, and to ensure the interests of investors are proteced. I’ve seen this more than once.
I’m also reassured by MaidSafe’s repeated attempts to decentralise development, and the knowledge in the code. I see them trying, partly succeeding (using remote developers, offering code bounties for a time), and also not managing to do this (pods we started but there wasn’t enough funding to support them). And then trying again now they have more funds. But none of that would be of value if they couldn’t get the network proven - which they are confident has happened just recently .
It’s clear that it is a very hard thing to decentralise development of such a difficult project when you have very limited resources and must keep delivering the project as the highest priority.
What Storj appear to have done here is on the face of it shocking, but I can imagine it was either for a compelling reason, or they succumbed to some temptation. It is up to them to explain what they’re doing, why, and how they expect investors of different kinds to be affected.
I can see why they’ve done it too, but yeah, for an early investor it does seem unfair to have the goal posts moved after the game has started.
Meh, tbh who cares. I don’t buy all this screwdriver and hammer analogy for Storj vs SAFE. It seems more like a pneumatic drill vs a hammer and chisel. I may have misunderstood the implications or use-case for a storj-like system, but it seem redundant once SAFE exists. I don’t buy any of the arguments given in favour of it still having any use in post-safe world. It’s one of the few pitches on BttF in the last year that I didn’t buy into
They’re decentralized Dropbox, nothing more. There is something somewhat similar called Degoo that offers 100GB of free storage that works based on a similar concept where people get extra free resources if their share their CPU. You could have also shared your HDD in exchange for extra resources but they’ve moved away from that model since it didn’t really work. You can get up to 500GB free storage by inviting people. Mega offers 50GB free storage while Storj offers 25GB.
That being said, I don’t really think Storj is anything special or particularly interesting.
Because I’m not really a newbie in this space, I will have those bitcoins send directly to Shapeshift, so Shapeshift can exchange those bitcoins to StorjX.
This was the quickest way for me to get StorjX. If I exclude the waiting time & Shapeshift exchange fee one might argue that was frictionless. Some people might take a different route: Create an account at an exchange (let’s exclude time and kyc/aml for fun)/send fiat to that exchange/exchange fiat for bitcoin (because for most exchanges btc seems to be the only way to exchange to altcoins)/exchange bitcoins to StorjX, now was that frictionless?
Unfortunately things are not that easy. There is a circulating supply of 50,468,144 SJCX and total supply of 500,000,000 SJCX. This means, that they have to get the themselves, people and exchanges to convert $ 78M+. Converting to an Ethereum token, brings them to the same problem that they need Ether for a transactions. This is why i think all these tokens will maybe turn into mutableData, no need for an extra token before you can send money, more important no waiting time.
(I applaud Storj for their ICO, they didn’t think like most people in this space to just offload all their coins, when you hold on to coins you can further develop whatever it is that your working on).
It took me a minimum of 2 steps to get StorjX, most people out there are still crawling with fiat in their hands. People can still farm StorjX, so it’s still valuable if you can also use it to buy storage. Our perception of value is always being corrupted by fiat, it would be nice to see the SAFE network’s lever at work.
That’s only because Storj didn’t bother to set up an easy system that allows people to buy into their ecosystem via their token.
Maidsafe, on the other hand, wants to do that and it also envisions Safecoin and been an integrated part of the ecosystem.
There are very easy ways to buy Bitcoin directly with fiat even using your debit card. I see people getting same kinda` direct access to Safecoin.
For Storj, having the token as an integrated part of the system was never essential or even something they’ve actively planned for. I’m pretty sure Maidsafe will allow users to purchase Safecoin very easily and directly, same as you purchase Amazon points or Steam credits.
I think I haven’t understood the problem. @CoinChatClub Can you explain again what you don’t like?
Doesn’t Storj buy the StorjX coins for their customers? Like the app devs that use heroku, they want to integrate a cloud provider for fiat. Storj provides them the space and is payed with fiat. They buy storjx with that fiat from the market and the farmers are payed with those storjx for their services, which they can in turn sell for fiat.
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