First of all, I think Cardano is a really great project.
I would be interested in your thoughts about decentralization.
I did actually started to set up a node, but I feel it is not profitable without making a youtube channel or becoming a ‘cardano influencer’ or creating a super-catchy ‘brand’. Of course, I appreciate that people do it, teach about cardano and so on.
But, do you think you can run a profitable node with focusing only on running/maintaining it, without too much advertising?
I did never mine bitcoin, but as far as I know, you just download it, connect your GPUs and you get your reward (in the early days at least).
Game theoretically speaking this seems to make sense…
Absolutely, assuming of course that you own stake is enough for the pool to produce at least a few blocks.
The reward for one block is currently a little more than 1’100 𝔸, so even one block per year(!) would be more than enough to cover the cost of a medium-sized VPS and the rest is profit. Just a few 100k𝔸 active stake are enough to make a block every other epoch or so.
If, on the other hand, your business model is to bring no (or very little) of your own stake and to take a cut out of other delegator’s rewards instead, then I’m afraid you will need to advertise because you would need to convince delegators to act against their own interest.
Actually he will win 1200 Ada + the cost which minimum is 340 + the margin % (340 once per epoch ) so if he will create 1 block per epoch he will earn ~ 1500
pS - 1 block per year it’s not enough… perhaps per month! (at this price)