Couldn't agree more on this.
Nothing is free, things get sold to people and we've seen in crypto people selling that "my bag cost less fee than BTC or ETH, so buy it".
. If someone creates a superior product then they win. That's not necessarily true on Hive where an old shitty app could operate as long as it had the stake to back it up.
Imo it is on the same level or worse than Vc's backing up projects. Only if people care enough of their stake and notice things personally where things are developed or improved to delegate stake it could be a lot better.
I'm genuinely curious how much does it cost to operate a node on hive?
The cost is wildly variable.
My node costs $50 a month and earns like $250/m but it's also quite bad and I need to upgrade.
A full node is a lot more expensive as it needs to allow others to connect to the API and serve requests.
A Condenser clone is even more expensive because that's basically providing a website like hive.blog or peakd.com that can allow frontend access to the chain.
It's basically expected that top 20 witnesses should pay more and provide better infrastructure.