Why does Storj Labs not pay Storage Node Operators directly in USD?

In many countries, receiving foreign currency as a payment may be prohibited by local laws unless you are a legal entity. There are a lot of restrictions around fiat.

At the time this article was published we had storage node operators located in 94 countries (http://storjnet.info/), so it would be nearly impossible to comply with all local requirements to send fiat USD to Operators.

Another problem is that sending international wire transfers is usually very slow and frequently involves very costly transaction fees. Even after paying the high fees, the transfer may still fail, get lost or be rejected.

In the case of STORJ tokens, we are not faced with the above mentioned problems in most cases (you would need to consult with a local attorney and your tax office regarding any local legal requirements around cryptocurrencies, we do not guarantee that receiving tokens is allowed in your country).

Also, the STORJ tokens you earn for sharing your hard drive and bandwidth can be used to pay for our Storj DCS service to store your files in our decentralized end-to-end encrypted S3 compatible cloud storage.