Good write up! I have been participating in the Storj test groups since the start of the year, and have gotten about 1000 SJCX in testing rewards so far for contributing 5 TB of capacity (of course this is in no way indicative of actual income after commercial launch). Storj inspired me to buy a low end Synology NAS, which has been great for archiving backups of my desktop system and being a Storj farmer 24/7. It was a bit complicated to setup farming on the NAS and required a bit of trial and error, but in the end I got it working with support from the fairly active Storj Slack community. These days it pretty much runs on auto pilot, but I still log onto the NAS and check logs every couple days to make sure things are going smoothly, and occasionally I have to upgrade the software when new versions get released.
Overall, being a Storj farmer has been an educational experience and a fun little hobby. Getting involved has expanded my personal horizons and taught me new tech skills, so even if farming doesn't become very profitable it's still worth it for me.
I wish the Storj team much success with future phases of the project! It's off to a good start and I look forward to a solid level of adoption after commercial launch.
i was participating in the Storj testing group and i manage to lose 10000 SJCX on coinbase.
Oh man, I feel your pain! Gave your article a read, hopefully it will prevent some people from making a similar mistake. Cryptocurrencies in general really need some safeguards to prevent this sort of thing; mainstream adoption will never occur until dangers such as this are no longer an issue.
Could you share more about the NAS that you have? What is a NAS any way?
NAS means Network Attached Storage. It's basically a very minimal computer without a keyboard or monitor, whose purpose is to house hard drives to provide extra storage space. It can be attached to a home network, which allows you to access its drives from your desktop PC. You can buy special hard drives which are optimized to run 24 hours a day for a NAS, such as the Western Digital Red 4 TB drives I have in mine.
My NAS is a Synology DS416. Here's a link to the Amazon product page: https://www.amazon.com/Synology-DS416-Station-Diskless-Attached/dp/B016EWTC7E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471576560&sr=8-1&keywords=synology+ds416
I like Synology because it provides an easy to use web admin interface that you can access using your desktop's web browser. It was also one of the brands discussed on the Storj Slack and known to be compatible with Storj. The DS416 is a relatively low end model, but still has enough memory and processing power to run the Storj software. It's a 4 bay NAS, meaning it can hold up to 4 hard drives all linked together. I only use 2 bays right now, but it's nice to have the extra bays available for future expansion.