While there is competition to become a delegate for the main chain, there will be plenty of demand to run delegates for the sidechains.
Thank you for your answer; however it is earning Lisk I am interested in, and since it's almost impossible to become a delegate of the main Lisk blockchain, can you point me to a sidechain which will allow me to earn Lisk for securing it?Wrong. We currently do not have anywhere near 101 people running testnet nodes.
https://testnet-explorer.lisk.io/delegateMonitor
Just click on "Status" to do a sort and look at the block of red dots. You can start a testnet node tonight and turn one of those red dots into a green dot with your name beside it. You wanna become a Lisk Mainnet Active Delegate when forging rewards eventually get turned on? Do your testnet homework now. Go to lisk.chat, start hanging out at #testnet, and direct message joel that you want to run a testnet node. The people running testnet nodes now are the only Liskers who are going to have sufficient experience to run mainnet nodes soon.
I won't get paid for running testnet, right? from what I see I'll be stuck there forever:
I am looking at the delegate monitor - there is just no way I can get in: already 632 delegates on standby! Almost all current delegates are the same guy (or seems like it): some guy called genesis - seems this one guy whale takes up everything.
my first impression of DPOS is not positive. No room for the little gal I am.
It is actually possible (although difficult) for a delegate to gather 14M votes right now, and take a spot of one of the genesis delegates.
This would be easier if people withdraw their Lisk from poloniex and vote.
Withdrawing your Lisk to a local wallet and voting, is not only good for decentralization of the network, but also much safer for your funds.
Yeah, especially since nearly 38% of all Lisk is on Poloniex atm. That's fucking dangerous to the health of the coin as a whole…
Btw, can someone clear somethign up for me? I've read a bit about delegates and you mostly read about renting a VPS and using that. But doesn't that mean that you rent the hardware of some serverfarm? Isn't that pretty… well, centralized? Or am I missing something? Are there people out there who run delegates on their own hardware?
On a different note, I have a RaspPi 2 laying around. Any chance that this thing can be used as a delegate (maybe for sidechains?)?
The amount of Lisk 1 delegate can forge in 1 month depends only on the server that he has, meaning specs and uptime?
More or less. As a delegate, you get 5 LSK(at least that's the last number I remember) every 17 minutes, plus transaction/other fees. So it's pretty much fixed. Specs don't really play a role(as long as the server is capable of fulfilling the task), uptime obviously does.
Edit: Amount of Lisk corrected
Polo volume never lower 220BTC/24H 
