Posts Tagged ‘StorjcoinX’

Storj DriveShare Rewards Report for January

5, Feb 2016

driveshare-stats

Last month we have decided to give out a try of the latest Storj DriveShare GUI and to participate in the beta testing of the service. We also wanted to check out the rewards that people are getting in return for their help in testing out the network and today Storj will be distributing the next bath of rewards. We have participated in the test for about 20 days with 100 GB of space shared on the network and according to the data published our reward for helping test the network in January is a little over 12 SJCX coins with about 94% uptime for the time duration. With the current StorjCoinX exchange rate this is about 115000 satoshi or about $0.45 USD, it may not seem that much, but do not forget that these are rewards for beta testing the service. Sharing more space for longer time with better uptime should bring you more rewards, though this should give you an idea on what to expect should you decide to help with beta testing. What you should know is that helping with beta testing won’t be that much profitable, but once the service officially launches what you get back in return for sharing your free hard drive space should be more rewarding.

For the moment however the users beta testing are required to purchase at least 10000 SJCX in order to be eligible for rewards and the rewards themselves are not that big unless you share a lot of space. The people sharing 25 TB of space each for the service are apparently getting about 1500 SJCX coins as a reward. So getting into the beta testing phase and participating in the reward program is more for people that do believe in the service and as a kind of a long term investment as well. You can of course participate in the testing of the service without having 10000 SJCX in your wallet, however this way you will not be eligible for receiving rewards for your help and support. So if you are interested in checking the service out you can head on to the official DriveShare website and download the GUI version of the software.

The number of unique participants in the beta testing of the DriveShare software in January is 533 that are eligible for rewards according to the official published rewards list. The list also includes 1222 more users that do not have 10000 SJCX coins in their wallet, meaning that they are participating without receiving rewards. As a comparison in December last year there were 420 unique wallets participating with at least 10000 SJCX and receiving rewards and 711 more that were not eligible for rewards. For November the numbers were 352 and 663 respectively, for October there were 342 and 393, so there are more users joining and helping test the service. Last week the service has announced the reach of another milestone in their testing phase, passing 2 PB of total storage shared and now it is already over 3 PB of storage shared.

– Visit the official DriveShare website for more details about the beta of the service…

Storj DriveShare Test Group B 2 PB Milestone Reached

26, Jan 2016

storjio-2-pb-milestone

Storj has announced that they have achieved another milestone in their testing phase, passing 2 TB of total storage shared by over 750 users currently participating in the Test Group B running the DriveShare application and sharing free space on their hard drives. Storj still has about 400000 SJCX to distribute as rewards for Test Group B users (users are required to have at least 10000 SJCX in their wallet in order to receive rewards from the beta testing). The Test Group B will continue to run until the promised rewards are distributed and then Test Group C will be launched which will be focused on testing actual file transfers on the P2P network including latency, bandwidth, throughput and more. For the moment the software only generates dummy data on the user’s hard drive for the shared amount of storage and does not download or upload it, so the next testing step will be focused on that part of the functionality of the service.

Recently we have posted a short guide on how you can participate in the Test Group B using the latest version of the DriveShare GUI software along with our experience going through the process of creating a StorjCoin X wallet and getting more than 10000 SJCX in it in order to be eligible for the rewards in Test Group B, so we are going to keep you updated on the testing progress and future development. You can test the DriveShare GUI software even if you do not have the 10000 SJCX coins in your wallet, but then you will not be eligible for getting rewards for your efforts. With that said if you are in for the rewards you should not expect to get too much SJCX coins as a reward for your help at the end of each month for participating in the testing phase, the rewards are there more as a token of gratitude for helping in the development of the service.

Trying Out the Latest Version of Storj DriveShare GUI

12, Jan 2016

driveshare-gui

Storj, the Blockchain-based cloud storage service, has released a new version 0.5 of their DriveShare GUI and we have decided to give it a try after keeping an eye on the development of Storj and their StorjcoinX (SJCX) crypto currency tokens. The DriverShare GUI is still an alpha build and the company is still testing it with the help of users by rewarding the participants with SJCX coins, though there is a catch – you need to have and use a wallet with at least 10000 SJCX coins in it in order to be eligible to receive any rewards for this test. So started from scratch by making a SJCX wallet, going through exchanges to buy at least 10000 StorjcoinX coins and installing and running the latest DriveShare GUI and below you can find our not so pleasant experience as well as details of what you actually need to do, how and where if you want to follow in our footsteps. You need to start by downloading the latest DriveShare GUI, it is available as binaries compiled for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux as well as a source code. This is the software you need to install and run on your computer to share some space in order to participate in the current test run of the service. The DriveShare GUI software is actually the easiest part, but as you will see after installing and running the software you will also need to create a Payout Address where you will need to also store at least 10000 SJCX coins in order to get rewards for your time and resources spent in helping test the service.

counterwallet-1

The official website recommends that you create a wallet address for SJCX at Counterwallet – the official web-based Counterparty Counterwallet server. It is recommended that you do not use a wallet address for SJCX that has been generated in an exchange as there you do not have control over the address and do not posses the private key for your wallet and that can cause you all kinds of trouble. As soon as yo register at the Counterwallet you will get a unique wallet address and this address is universal and will work for Bitcoin (BTC) and Counterparty (XCP) as you will see in your wallet dashboard, but what about SJCX?

counterwallet-2

What is not very clearly stated however is that the address you get is also for StorjcoinX (SJCX) as well and as soon as you transfer some coins to it you will see another box added for SJCX. This can cause a bit of a confusion for users that are using the Counterwallet and are not very familiar with it as well as the SJCX and unfortunately it is not very clearly explained on the StorjcoinX website, they do point you to an user video that actually explains this with not official more detailed explanation. Still once you get your wallet and do send some small amount of coins to try things out you will pretty much understand how things work with Counterwallet and StorjcoinX. Do note however that if you want to send out SJCX coins from your web-based wallet there will be a fee of 0.0005 BTC to perform the action or roughly about $0.225 USD. This is the standard fee and you cannot pay the fee in SJCX, only in BTC, so you will also need to have a small amount of Bitcoins in the wallet in order to be able to cover the fees. Also make sure that you use the Show Private Key option in the wallet and save the wallet address and the private key for it in a secure place in case you need to recover it at a later time.

poloniex-buy-sjcx

The next step is to buy some StorjcoinX from one of the exchanges that does have SJCX markets, since the service backed by the tokens is still in testing period it is to be expected that there are not many exchanges supporting it. You can buy from two of the biggest altcoin exchanges – Bittrex and Poloniex as well as from services such as ShapeShift or even from the Counterwallet. Unfortunately the market at Counterwallet is not very active and the pair SJCX/XBTC (StorjcoinX/Bitcoin) does not have any buy or sell offers at the moment, so it is not very usable. ShapeShift is a convenient service that allows you to exchange between multiple crypto currency pairs without even having to register, but the exchange rate there is usually not the best. So you need to go to an exchange and buy the 10000 SJCX coins from there, leaving you the two options currently available – Bittrex and Poloniex. We have started with Bittrex, however we soon found out that the SJCX volume there is too low and buying 10000 StorjcoinX from there would mean that we would have to spend much more than the average price. So we just bought a few hundred coins to try the Counterwallet and the transfer was quick and problem free from Bittrex to the Counterwallet.

Then we have moved to Poloniex to buy more coins as apparently the exchange of choice and with the largest volume for SJCX is precisely this one, we have bought a little over 13000 SJCX with an average price of about 3600 satoshi per SJCX and then tried to withdraw them in a single transaction to the Counterwallet. Unfortunately the withdraw did not complete successfully, we got an error message, so we’ve written to the support at Poloniex and a few hours later we’ve had the SJCX coins available back in the account. We have initiated another withdraw request, but unfortunately it did not go through either, so we are waiting again for the support to resolve the issue. If we get back the coins back in our account we are going to try to withdraw them at smaller portions again and if these do not go through again, then it would seem that Poloniex might have some issue with SJCX at the moment which will not be very good at all. The issue with Poloniex withdraws of SJCX was resolved by the support and the coins are now in our wallet.

All in all, even though the things are still in testing period, there is still much work needed to be done to make everything more clear and user friendly to new users as the goal of such a service is to become mainstream in order to be successful. Storj has a great idea and they are doing the software implementation quite well already, but they also need to work on other parts of the ecosystem such as the wallets and the exchanges as apparently these are farm from what they should be in terms of ease of use and being problem free for the users. Hopefully by the time everything is ready for an official launch things will be improved further and they will be easy for everyone that wants to take advantage from the ideas behind this Blockchain-based cloud storage service.


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