Another curious point is the economics of mining vs a sanctuary - if we want to play the numbers game. I'll assume 1 BBP = ~.0034 USD.
I currently have 2 sancs that cost me $5/month each ($10/month total) and net me ~4800 BBP/day each (so let's say 9600 BBP /day, or 9600*365/12 = 292000 BBP/month).
Even at today's rates, that's about $1000/month.
So I'm spending $10/month to get $1000/month back - assuming I can stake/reserve 3000000 BBP, meaning I'm reserving about $10k of coins.
That's a pretty ludicrous payback, and the only drawback is that I had to have $10k to get started.
Now doing it the mining way is very profitable as well - you are saying that a 200K RAC gets you $108/day, or $3285/month (108*365/12), for an upfront equipment cost of $5200 and a staking balance of about $13000.
I'll also assume that energy costs (which I don't have with a rented, hosted server) costs you about $30/month/server, or about $780/month. (It could be slightly different).
Now let's do some analysis:
Mining is OBVIOUSLY more profitable. A buy-in (between equipment and staking) of $18000 gets you $30000 profit in the first 12 months. Where as sanctuaries require far less ($10000 upfront for 2, all staking), and gain a profit of $11800 in the first 12 months.
Now, I would say that these are two very different user bases - HOWEVER...if a user was interested in becoming a power miner, one way to get into it would be to start with the lower costs of running a few sancs for a couple of months.
If you did that for say, 6 months, you'd have more than enough BBP to cover the mining staking (converting your sanc stake + sanc daily rewards), and almost exactly enough profit to buy the equipment you mentioned. And there you go - voila, the big rewards come with little upfront cost. During this 6 months, they could make proposals that would benefit miners and vote for them, setting themselves up for better success when they do the conversion.
I'm not saying that this is a good plan for people - just that it isn't that hard to game the system if someone really, REALLY wants to. You don't need a massive whale with hundreds of thousands of dollars to put in, when we are this small...
Yes, that is roughly the way I was blessed into the project. Although the mining rewards should decrease more rapidly than the sanctuary rewards, that is why it is imperative that we get a way to get prices to increase in order to preserve mining margins for everyone: for the miners, for the growth of the network, for the orphans.
Each server draws about 300W so 300*24 is 7.2 KWh per day. My electricity cost is about .067 per KWh so that is about .48 to run a server without cooling per day. Obviously mining over the winter is cheaper than the summer. With cooling your $30 / mo/server is probably not far off, over the winter, its about half that. You could also throw in something for rent. Internet access isn't that much. I was blessed to find this project before the sanctuaries and bought enough for some. As for the vote for stake to RAC, everyone was invited to participate; it wasn't just held by the sanctuaries.
My data points were roughly the lines of this. Starting from a baseline of 0 coins and 0 computers, buying enough hardware and coin to fully stake it was cost beneficial versus buying the same amount of coins you would need to make Masternodes for the same daily rewards. You would have hardware of some value and coin of some value, higher expenses with PoDC but could ultimately get in the door on a moderate operation for a cheaper price. The main downside was if the coin rapidly appreciated, you wouldn't gain the appreciation of your holdings as much going hardware, but by the same token, you would still have moderately valuable hardware if the price collapsed.
We're not hearing ANY complaining how Masternodes are way overpriced. The necessity to stake at the levels that were voted in (which I was personally not in favor of but have since become more favorable to) locks coins up. For a brand new user, buying coins to PoDC is NOT a hardship as the ROI is still very good by normal standards (even if it's not in the 100%+ range). And the beauty is on a percentage basis, the ROI is the same for a person with one PoDC machine or a fleet of servers. But much like the person mining Ethereum with one GPU is going to receive less coin than the person running 18 GPU, the investment ratio remains comparable. You spend 10x as much, you make (or lose) 10x as much. We all have different situations, different thresh holds for how much we can afford or choose to afford, but in the end, if you have one machine grinding out 1K RAC you get 1/10th as much as the user with 10K RAC but you also have 1/10ths the expense for staking and operations.
Increasing, decreasing, leaving the staking requirement alone, there is no guarantee what any of these will do beyond the idea that a dramatic reduction or elimination will leave us wide open to botnets. But increasing the requirement COULD increase the price dramatically which COULD bring more users in after a higher dollar reward or drive existing users away. Or it COULD decrease the price dramatically and that COULD increase the users who are making a lower ROI or chase existing users away due to reduced rewards. In the end, changing staking is possible but has no guaranteed results.
The real issue that is being expressed (but not outright said) is the first mover advantage that early adopters of this coin (like every other coin) have versus new users. We should do our best to help new users into the coin, but the simple fact remains that early adopters grabbed coins at 1/5th the price when the coin was unsteady and get a better return based on their purchase price. But they still get the same return as anyone else based on the current cash values. The coin may appreciate, it may stagnate in price, it may fall. No one really knows. PoDC mining is still profitable on most levels AND helps advance the scientific research community. I've said it before, but in a very very short time we've become approximately 20% of the research at Rosetta@home and about 1% of the research at World Community Grid. In less than 3 months, we're already the 15th biggest contributor of all time at R@h and the 575th biggest at WCG in under ONE month.
I agree with you on all fronts. Lowering the BBP/RAC gives us no guarantee that the price will rise. I would also like to say that I'm not a proponent of lowering the staking at this point in time, because I don't know all the variables. I'm just saying that the high staking requirements have been holding people back from starting mining (and in extension of that, they have probably moved on to other projects while they could have possibly been of added value to us).
In the end, I just want as many new users as possible, in whichever way possible. I actually think the best way to do that, is to add things to BiblePay that give it value (software, real-world applications, you name it). And get more exposure for the project.
Indeed the ROI on mining is pretty good at the moment, if you can pay for the staking.
But I fear some people may be disappointed when they find out that 5 BBP is only 1 cent.
