I find this project interesting and with huge potential however i have few serious notifications, take it as an opinion (doubts) of "average random visitor" who listened about storj for the first time
1. The testing of the project is a little weird. Its almost closed for anybody except people who were just in at beginnings or bought in until current pump. Every testing should motivate to have the most participants but you do the right opposite.
2. Storj becomes known as "the coin with 10.000 coins barriere". Today its almost 1000USD
This is not the best impression.
3. There is no sign of any testing other way than testing only the one side - the side of storage providers. Hell yeah only motivated storage providers. I dont think the test phase contains enough variables to simulate at least most possible cases if not all of them. I dont think there is enough testing e. g. at customer side (load of server which is managing customers, database of deals, backup of these databases, customer support, tickets, complaints). Not the headers and cylinders of hard drives but the customers will decide this game.
4. The system where the exchange rate of currency will dictate the price of service itself cant work. Fixed coin cap cant serve variable number of customers. There will be only a lack of demand or lack of technical resources, i cant realize how you will ingraft the almost fixed price of competitive services onto variable exchange rate of currency and variable market estate. There are 3 different variables tried to be messed up into one price, this is cut-and-try economical engineering. If everyone will be speculating or gambling with the price there will be almost zero real users of service. If the price will be fair enough and there appear real users people will start to gamble with price which will become oppressive and nobody will really use the storjage.
And last example - if the price will be ridiculously low, there appears big demand but nobody will be willing to provide his space so instead of price increase we will see unsatisfied demand.
1. Previous Test Group B is now over, wait for Test Group C to start which will have new rules and requirements, specifically regarding SJCX.
2. Storj had over 1500 testers, they didn't need 1 million because the backend could not support that. They are happy with the test results so far. See above for what's next.
3. The other side was not ready for testing until recently, if you saw Storj announcement yesterday they are ready to go with full scale testing. Mind you MetaDisk (now simply called Storj) is mainly for developers to build apps using the API. If you register on storj.io you'll be able to get an invite on a first come, first served basis. And you will be able to test uploads as a end user at
https://app.storj.io.
4. SJCX will be used mainly for the backend (to reward storage providers) once the network goes live. The team has stated that end-users that upload files (again once live) using Storj will have options to pay for storage with whatever mean is best, and there will be options to use FIAT and CC. Also consider that anyone will be able to build their own front-ends to Storj and they will be free to accept anything they want for payment. Checkout storj.io for an estimate of the cost to store data on Storj.
Hope this helps.