To be a witness is to be commited to the Hive blockchain. It is not profitable to be a Witness on a lower rank. I would say only the top 20 have the remote possibility of maybe making a return on their investment, and even them, because the run other services for Hive, may not make it! So maybe even some top 20 may not get back what they invest in infrastructure back as HIVE Power.
My server
My server is not expensive, considering its resources, it was actually a great deal. Under 100 Euros a month for an extremely powerful hardware. Now that the Euro and the US Dollar are hovering around 1-to-1 it it means under 100 USD a month for a very powerful server. I can run all my Hive stuff and it doesn't even consume 20% of the resources, which means I am relatively safe if the network activity goes up unexpectedly!
My "earnings"
Witnesses get "paid" in HIVE Power to produce blocks, but I put that in quotes because, personally, I don't plan on powering down. I have enough HBD to keep my witness server running for over 1 more year, so I probably won't need to power down.
@quochuy publishes a monthly report on witnesses earnings. I am positioned at #102 on the rank of witnesses, at the time of writing this, but I am #88 on the active witnesses rank (many witnesses above me are not producing blocks regularly!).
The witnesses ranked at #81 and #82 are making just under 100HP a month, at the current exchange rate that would be around $40 a month
Conclusion
My server costs me around $95 USD a month, and by producing blocks I would, optimistically, get just under 100 HIVE Power a month. At the current exchange rate that is $40 USD.
Even if HIVE doubles in price, if it goes up 100%, I would still make under $90, which means I would still not make it back what I need to invest on infrastructure.
Am I complaining? No! Being a witness is awesome and I am proud of being part of the history of blocks on this blockchain.
It would be nice if HIVE went up to 1 US Dollar, then I would know that for every single dollar I spend on my server I am actually "buying and powering up HIVE". It would be like buying HIVE indirectly! I am buying HIVE and powering up it on a weekly basis anyways, being a witness is just part of the process.
Reassure me that your server does not only do witness but also does node RPC because for a witness server it's overkill.
Spec of mine (I have 2, the second is a backup/seed node/testing server) and it works well since 3 years ;)
CPU:Intel Xeon E3-1270v6 4 Cores/8 Threads 3.5 GHz/3.9 GHz RAM: 32GB DDR4 ECC 2133MHz HDD: 1 To SSD NVMeIf with 10,000 HIVE/month top 20 don't have their ROI there is a problem hahaha and for other things than witness, there is the Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF).
A tool that can help you in your calculation of your ROI: https://www.cutehive.com/witnesses.php
Starting under rank 60 you will win enough to pay your server, at my rank (active 72) I make 155 HIVE/month which pays one of my servers + part of the reimbursement for 3 years of losing money, maybe in 3 years it will be the turn of my 2nd server hahaha
Not RPC yet, I want to get a domain and set the RPC on it on another docker, separated logically, will do when I have the available time. But I am running some other personal projects. I knew it would be overkill but not by that much. Once I have some availability I will try to see how to also run a hive-engine node and how can I serve that data too.
A lot of things to do, little time, but at least the server for sure won't be a bottleneck.
Do you run RPC? I don't yet which is a waste, I will learn how to serve Hive data so those resources won't be wasted. If you have tutorials, docs or any material that can help me set that up I would appreciate. Thanks either way.
Nope, maybe after the next hardfork (not sure yet), for the documentation, I think a good starting point is here: https://developers.hive.io/quickstart/hive_full_nodes.html
Thanks for the perspective.
!discovery 19
As a backup witness, you don't need to worry about high performance server yet. I can see for example that you have 128GB of RAM, that's not necessary. The recent version of hived does not need that much memory for a witness node. My server only have 32GB. And you also have 2x 3.84TB which is way more than the current disk usage of around 630GB. You should be able to find a working server for 50-60 USD. You could even drop the memory down to 8 - 16GB and use more disk for the state file by sacrificing replay time.
The satisfaction of being able to be a part as witiness must be a good payment, I hope the hive goes up, it will be wonderful and rewarding for you!
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Probably it will go up to $1 USD. And probably even more. Maybe not in the near future, but later. I still remember, when it was around $3 USD. If you consider this as a long term investment, then this may be actually profitable.
Good luck and all the best.
I don't consider being a witness as an investment, not exactly, because it would be more profitable to buy HIVE directly and wait for it to go up, don't you agree? I need $1 to break even, but if I bought not instead of break even I would be massively in profit
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I voted you for a witness, hope it helps a little. Im considering starting up a witness also, even if it is unprofitable, I would consider it an investment in hive power and supporting the network, and if/when hive does rise considerably, it could turn out to be quite profitable.
Can you point me to a dummy version of setting up a witness node? I have no programming experience, or is it not advised to do without programming experience?
I thought Hive was bigger until I saw recently the market cap was only 180k and is on the #130s on coinmarketcap. I know hive history never experienced the center of attention steem felt. And also know how dystopic is the market cap on CMC.
But would be good if the Hive network really progress differently. Now is a different era on Blockchain and seen like a competition on who can get and push the most dApps. But hive core dApp is about social network and it's growth should be better than just a platform for users of the same platform.
Mining/Witness during crypto winter is always a pain, but u will be well rewarded when the bull come bck
So that is because you are renting a server.
If you had your own server, would you be better?
I don't, at the moment, have a need for a server, so I would have to buy one either way. I could, theoretically, leave mine on 24/7 but that makes me uncomfortable.
But the server I was using before could reach a break even, it was from Contabo and was from $30 to $40, I upgraded because I want to host other stuff in the future