Thoughts on decentralized ethos

Nodes & Mining
#1

Greetings,

I have some thoughts on the decentralized nature of this network. First off, I operate one full node from my pc at home. This node has been running for a week or so. When I heard about the NKN project recently, I thought this is something I should get involved in and contribute to. I like the idea behind the network, and the work (bandwidth + cpu power) that I contribute would be worthwhile.

I have read posts on the forums from users claiming to operate thousands of nodes on amazon or google cloud servers. On one hand I get it, people want to make some money off of it. On the other hand, it completely baffles me. I wonder how many people are behind these nodes, is it 100 people with hundreds or thousands of nodes on cloud servers? Or are there a lot of small guys like me running a node out of their home? Does running nodes for a decentralized network – on a centralized location – make sense logically? I see it makes sense economically, since those servers have way better latency connections than people running nodes from their homes.

With all the blocks mined in a day, it seems there are a few addresses that get blocks mined every few minutes. These are undoubtedly the mass deployed ‘nodes’ that are sitting in a centralized data center somewhere.

I’m trying to figure out who this network is really for, people who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a day on node space, or for those who actually contribute to the decentralized nature of the network.

I have much to learn about this project and I am quite interested in it. As it stands now with how rewards are assigned, it seems like there isn’t much of a reason for me to operate a node that basically sits there and observes the network, not doing any real work. Rewards are assigned for doing work, right?

I look forward to hearing the opinions of my fellow community members.

#2

I personally run 16 nodes, to test out the software from a small miner perspective. They are scattered across home (Raspberry Pi), AWS, GCP, DO, Linode and Oracle Cloud. 10 nodes are in US, 3 in Europe, and 3 in Asia. Mining reward are better on the cloud machines than home Raspberry, due to the Internet latency. But I run home node almost with no cost, while cloud nodes cost more than it is worth. After all, I’m in for the tech. :slight_smile:

That is only about the native mining yields. And in this case, traffic are run over a few random nodes.

We have more and more services running on top of NKN, e.g. nConnect secure remote access, TUNA tunneling services, that pays small amount of NKN directly to a NKN relay node for faster service. This is additional revenue for miners, on top of the native NKN mining. We are still ramping up nConnect services with Synology and QNAP in China, and Asustor globally. Later Synology and QNAP will support nConnect globally as well. We hope such service generated revenue, will encourage nodes who are located closer to the service consumers.

#3

The network is a very interesting concept. I will contribute by running a node for now, and when time allows, research other ways to contribute.

I also have interests in other crypto projects, and would like to ask anyone if they have experience running a node on a server or workstation while that computer is working on other crypto projects simultaneously. I am curious if one affects the other and if it would be better to run each project separately on different computers.