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Your profile made me laugh.

Thanks for answering. What is expensive about steem nodes? A reasonable computer, decent bandwidth and if they are an exchange they are likely to have enough vests to be witnessing lots of blocks. Surely it would be profitable wouldn't it?

Theyd have to be elected to be a witness.

Servers with enough memory, and a person to run it, are not cheap.
They can, but they dont want to.
Look at poloniex, theirs has been down for months.

Wasn't even my question but I also want to thank you for your reply, it does make sense, but surprising the exchanges do not get their value out of it all. Very surprised, but now I do understand why the @Changelly and @Shapeshiftio don't always have Steem and SBD up, but Blocktrades has that direct link ad to buy Steem on every transfer page so they are always up. The world makes a lot more sense now.

Likely there isnt enough volume to make enough in fees to cover their desired profit margins.

Blocktrades has been here from very early on, and does take alot of hassle out of the process.

Nothing but love for Blocktrades, I use them all the time, however it does seem like that spot should maybe be a dropdown with choices of different ways to buy Steem. Would keep things fair as well as be a sign of good faith to all exchanges that Steem is decentralized and open to all.

Lol, that was funny.

It wasn't supposed to be :(