I started running two nodes a week ago. My computer shows >2TB of download, <1TB of upload, and not even one ANT payment to my rewards address. Most of this traffic is from the Autonomi nodes. Each antnode’s record_store is ~50 GB in size.
This suggests to me that Autonomi is being used to store vast amounts of temporary data. Such a workload may be for log storage, or short-term data backups (e.g. VM drive snapshots). With traditional cloud providers, many businesses spend a lot of money on temporary storage. Autonomi’s prices are cheap compared with cloud storage they’re used to paying. Especially if Scratchpad buys are timed to coincide with low Arbitrum gas fees.
From what I can tell, Scratchpad costs a similar amount to Chunk (but can be rewritten unlimited times, doesn’t benefit from self-encryption and deduplication, etc). If businesses are going to be (inadvertently) economically incentivized use Autonomi as a cheap place to pay-once to “forever” churn their temporary data, the economics may be too disfavorable to node operators. I’ve briefly reviewed Autonomi’s whitepaper, and of the changes for 2.0 I don’t see much about different treatment for Scratchpad uploads.
1 week for my computer (most transfer is by Autonomi nodes):
