No (somewhat complicated question but that's really the answer).
Anyway, as a practical matter, at current or potentially even lower STEEM prices in the future, there isn't enough revenue for witnesses to do it. All witness rewards added together are only about $600K right now which is far less than what Steemit Inc. is spending on its node cluster. That is ALL witness revenue, and no it can't all be used to provide API nodes.
There needs to be a better business model that involves actual revenue to support the servers. Providing unlimited usage for free doesn't scale and isn't sustainable whether witnesses or Steemit Inc is doing it.
Witness rewards were about 5x higher pre-HF16 as I noted elsewhere. Costs were also much lower (smaller blockchain), and the initial witnesses were all early adopter whales who didn't really need the rewards. In case you don't know power down used to take two years so the rewards (which have always been 100% SP) weren't even all that accessible to cover costs (plus for a while, no exchanges). Witnesses covered costs out of pocket, though again the costs were much lower (any cheap server would suffice).
Difficult question, a High-level witness should already be running decent witness clusters with redundancies which come at a decent price attached already. I believe the people who should be running these are those who mainly use these APIs as well and benefit from them.
as suggested in the livestream, idea would be to focus on "fixing" the software as to so that running full nodes would not have such high RAM requirements, drastically lowering node expenditures. IMHO this is truly a way forward. With bitshares there is a "node selection" setting based on latency. This could be a way forward as more nodes become available and there would be a static "discovery file" for those nodes (hosted on github) which could be integrated in third party apps or proxies. In Steemit.com / settings one could manually pick a node, or get the node with lowest latency automatically connected.
I mean early on you can rely on small free nodes which for example witnesses or steemit inc could make available. But as soon as you move bigger amounts of data you would be forced to switch (Like it is with any other system as well). On other blockchains you have to send gas or crypto with every action you do on the chain.
I agree, the problem would then be how you decide if a project is now to big.
For the seconde point, isn't it the selling argument for Steem: Free and Fast Transactions
Witnesses generally provide block producing/validating node services, seed nodes and backups thereof as well as governance participation and decision making at chain level. RPC nodes are much more specialised and costly, only a handful of witnesses can run full nodes.
They should also review the code.
Test changes
Make pull requests
Delegate all their stake to communities
Fight spam
Running $1,000+ /m full node
$500-1,000+ witness cluster
Test on test net
Provide witness server for test net
Be available 24-7 for outages
Do all nighters for hard and soft forks
Answer witness surveys
All for $36,500/year (which isn’t even liquid) as a top 20 witness. I’m #30 and make 1/8th that.
Just to put in perspective, a blockchain dev that is capable of reviewing code and making patches is worth $100,000-$250,000/year if all he did was code.
It's not only about earning enough for the hardware, it is about the admin overhead to do it. It also sets a bad precedent that is not scalable, Steemit Inc has many times more stake than the witnesses have and they are struggling, one should not increase witness overhead so that bidbots can be more profitable off of free infrastructure. Basically witnesses provide core blockchain functions, much like local town councils provide basic amenities communities require, such as roads, refuse removal, town planning, bylaws etc, but they don't provide electricity for free to businesses and households, which wouldn't be sustainable.
Agreed, the issue is that when you provide a public rpc node there is no easy way to identify and limit or exclude users, it's kind of all or nothing. The minute you make a node public all the freeloaders pile on and the node is bogged down to a crawl and the only recourse you have is to constantly tweak rate limiting or add more nodes to the cluster as Steemit does.
The key is to educate both the services and the consumer to switch buying habits, ie to not use services that freeload off of public infra when they can afford it, much like you would not purchase products where animals have been harmed in testing or products that have non-recyclable packaging.
I wonder if app operators, especially those benefitting stake delegations would consider beneficiary for node access.
And how that would work out financially. Because the “benevolent” model doesn’t work freely. Inflationpool is of course an issue in a beneficiary model but would definitely be worth doing some math on to check the finances.
I am not an expert in this so I will believe what you said, but this reeducation is not that simple, you see it IRL, not everyone is buying the bio Or fair trade stuff.
That's why there is "hard reeducation" and "soft reeducation". Changing company habbits is easy by just turning off these public clusters. These would then have to educate the consumers that there is nothing for free.
But are these services economically sustainable then?
Shouldn't they develop a business model which allows this?
Advertisements, Freemium, Premium models?
In my point of view (as a customer) I prefer a service that is down 3 days in the year then a service I have to pay for. And so the people will always go to the cheapest one.
There are no free services. You always pay one way or the other. Either you pay with your data, or you pay with watching advertisements or the big premium users pay for the small free users. There is no free lunch.
No (somewhat complicated question but that's really the answer).
Anyway, as a practical matter, at current or potentially even lower STEEM prices in the future, there isn't enough revenue for witnesses to do it. All witness rewards added together are only about $600K right now which is far less than what Steemit Inc. is spending on its node cluster. That is ALL witness revenue, and no it can't all be used to provide API nodes.
There needs to be a better business model that involves actual revenue to support the servers. Providing unlimited usage for free doesn't scale and isn't sustainable whether witnesses or Steemit Inc is doing it.
When steem was new (price=few cents), how witnesses were managing costs?
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Witness rewards were about 5x higher pre-HF16 as I noted elsewhere. Costs were also much lower (smaller blockchain), and the initial witnesses were all early adopter whales who didn't really need the rewards. In case you don't know power down used to take two years so the rewards (which have always been 100% SP) weren't even all that accessible to cover costs (plus for a while, no exchanges). Witnesses covered costs out of pocket, though again the costs were much lower (any cheap server would suffice).
Ok I didn't knew they had so many nodes
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@smooth drops mic :) booya!
Difficult question, a High-level witness should already be running decent witness clusters with redundancies which come at a decent price attached already. I believe the people who should be running these are those who mainly use these APIs as well and benefit from them.
The problem is that you can't provide a free application if you have to pay such a node, so the solutions would be:
Posted using Partiko Android
as suggested in the livestream, idea would be to focus on "fixing" the software as to so that running full nodes would not have such high RAM requirements, drastically lowering node expenditures. IMHO this is truly a way forward. With bitshares there is a "node selection" setting based on latency. This could be a way forward as more nodes become available and there would be a static "discovery file" for those nodes (hosted on github) which could be integrated in third party apps or proxies. In Steemit.com / settings one could manually pick a node, or get the node with lowest latency automatically connected.
https://wallet.bitshares.org/#/settings/access
good one - sounds feasible and a realistic outlook
I mean early on you can rely on small free nodes which for example witnesses or steemit inc could make available. But as soon as you move bigger amounts of data you would be forced to switch (Like it is with any other system as well). On other blockchains you have to send gas or crypto with every action you do on the chain.
I agree, the problem would then be how you decide if a project is now to big.
For the seconde point, isn't it the selling argument for Steem: Free and Fast Transactions
Posted using Partiko Android
Yes, but not unlimited free and fast transactions.
Witnesses generally provide block producing/validating node services, seed nodes and backups thereof as well as governance participation and decision making at chain level. RPC nodes are much more specialised and costly, only a handful of witnesses can run full nodes.
As far as I know every top 20 should earn enough to Run one
Posted using Partiko Android
They should also review the code.
Test changes
Make pull requests
Delegate all their stake to communities
Fight spam
Running $1,000+ /m full node
$500-1,000+ witness cluster
Test on test net
Provide witness server for test net
Be available 24-7 for outages
Do all nighters for hard and soft forks
Answer witness surveys
All for $36,500/year (which isn’t even liquid) as a top 20 witness. I’m #30 and make 1/8th that.
Just to put in perspective, a blockchain dev that is capable of reviewing code and making patches is worth $100,000-$250,000/year if all he did was code.
This reward is only so low because of the price, they made over 500k some time ago when the price was high.
Posted using Partiko Android
It's not only about earning enough for the hardware, it is about the admin overhead to do it. It also sets a bad precedent that is not scalable, Steemit Inc has many times more stake than the witnesses have and they are struggling, one should not increase witness overhead so that bidbots can be more profitable off of free infrastructure. Basically witnesses provide core blockchain functions, much like local town councils provide basic amenities communities require, such as roads, refuse removal, town planning, bylaws etc, but they don't provide electricity for free to businesses and households, which wouldn't be sustainable.
For bidbot this is true they can pay such servers, but there are a lot of free services here that rely on this free infrastrustur
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Agreed, the issue is that when you provide a public rpc node there is no easy way to identify and limit or exclude users, it's kind of all or nothing. The minute you make a node public all the freeloaders pile on and the node is bogged down to a crawl and the only recourse you have is to constantly tweak rate limiting or add more nodes to the cluster as Steemit does.
The key is to educate both the services and the consumer to switch buying habits, ie to not use services that freeload off of public infra when they can afford it, much like you would not purchase products where animals have been harmed in testing or products that have non-recyclable packaging.
I wonder if app operators, especially those benefitting stake delegations would consider beneficiary for node access.
And how that would work out financially. Because the “benevolent” model doesn’t work freely. Inflationpool is of course an issue in a beneficiary model but would definitely be worth doing some math on to check the finances.
I am not an expert in this so I will believe what you said, but this reeducation is not that simple, you see it IRL, not everyone is buying the bio Or fair trade stuff.
Posted using Partiko Android
That's why there is "hard reeducation" and "soft reeducation". Changing company habbits is easy by just turning off these public clusters. These would then have to educate the consumers that there is nothing for free.
There is no such thing as free.
But are these services economically sustainable then?
Shouldn't they develop a business model which allows this?
Advertisements, Freemium, Premium models?
In my point of view (as a customer) I prefer a service that is down 3 days in the year then a service I have to pay for. And so the people will always go to the cheapest one.
Posted using Partiko Android
There are no free services. You always pay one way or the other. Either you pay with your data, or you pay with watching advertisements or the big premium users pay for the small free users. There is no free lunch.
So then, in that model, you get a total of 20 nodes. That's not enough.