I have a separate question: I was watching Jerry Banfield speak on how top witnesses are getting about $300 per day. I found that video when I was asking around and researching the costs of having a full node and seed node. Crim said a fully outfitted witness + seed costs $600 a month. Granted, most smaller witness don't have full nodes or seed nodes nor are being paid. Smaller setups looked around a loss of around $150 a month until breaking even point, if lucky. Okay... some exchanges have witness nodes (not sure about seed nodes.)
Are these numbers wrong?
If these numbers are right, witnessing for the top witnesses pays for itself in 2 or 3 days. Can you explain why cost is a threat?
Here is a post that explains the witness pay. The ‘miner’ was replaced with an additional top witness (there are 20 now instead of 19) but the calculations are all still correct.
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@timcliff/til-how-much-witnesses-and-miners-make-per-block
Affording servers is not an issue for the top witnesses (assuming the price of STEEM stays above a certain level). The costs are a lot harder for the backup witnesses though - many of whom run their servers at a loss. There are also exchanges that run nodes, and if the costs for those get too high - we risk getting delisted from exchanges. Many third party developers also need to run nodes to support their applications - so expensive nodes are bad for them as well.
It is important for us to keep the costs to run servers in mind - because a lot of important parts of our ecosystem depend on running servers. Right now the cost per legitimate user for running the network is on the high side , and spam is part of why that is. That’s basically where the post is coming from, even though the particular solution being proposed doesn’t sound like it will fly.
Is the miner returning with the next hard fork?
I'll read then and be back.
No. They have proposed to add back mining, but only for account creation - not for producing blocks.