There is a reward for signing blocks, the majority goes to the top 20, but it’s a fantastic learning experience running a witness node.
Plus we keep the chain decentralized, I run my own servers and don’t rent a vps like most do.
There have been cases of data centers not allowing crypto mining and shutting down a network, like what happened to solana blockchain.
My bottleneck to setting up a node was the CPU / SSD requirements. I might try to make it down on the 25th and pick your brains. :)