Many folks have been asking if purchasing a 3Node is a worthwhile investment. Some are concerned about the fact that the price of a Titan could buy as many tokens as it’s expected to farm over five years. I think this view is a bit shortsighted.
The first big reason is that you’ll still own your node after five years. Most likely, it will continue functioning and farming tokens for a long time after that. In any case, it’s a general purpose computer with value outside of it’s use as a 3Node. You can’t say the same for many miners and single purpose nodes on the market today.
The next big reason is that as a farmer, you get a substantial discount on your own node’s capacity (granted, this does require some technical capabilities to utilize). While 25% will still be burned to support future growth of the network, 75% of the cost will be retained by farmers who use their own nodes. This becomes even more interesting when you consider the growing opportunities to run income generating software on top of your income generating hardware.
Already, it is possible (guide coming soon) to operate a Presearch node on your own 3Node. Presearch only requires a modest stake to get started, and there’s no risk of slashing unless you modify the software with malicious intent. Earnings from the Presearch node are modest while the decentralized portion of their network is in beta, but they well exceed what a farmer would pay for the deployment. And by the way, Presearch is a ThreeFold partner with a very slick solution for node deployment on the ThreeFold eVDC Marketplace, if you want to take that for a spin.
Another project I see as promising for this purpose is the Theta Network, which rewards participants for sharing bandwidth, storage, and compute resources for decentralized video streaming. Their edge node software currently only runs on Windows and MacOS, but when they release a Linux version, I’ll be testing it out. This is exactly the kind of “edge” application that small 3Nodes are well suited for.
I think we’ll see many more decentralized projects that can run on 3Nodes and generate additional income, without requiring large stakes like many blockchain validator nodes currently do. That said, if you’re someone who’s already motivated to support a blockchain network by running a full node, running it on your 3Node is a win win. You’d have to pay for hardware or rent server space anyway, so why not farm too? For example, I’m now operating a Bitcoin full node on my 3Node, which could also generate income by routing payments on the Lightning Network.
Even if you’re not into running nodes, we all need compute and storage capacity to serve our digital needs. I fully expect we’ll see many creative ways for farmers to leverage their nodes for greater freedom and sovereignty over existing solutions from corporate cloud providers. In fact, I know from following this forum that some determined individuals are already working on it (that’s you, @naturecrypto 
).
At the end of the day, ThreeFold farming is designed to provide an attractive investment over a five year period, regardless of the possibilities to generate additional income by running software from other projects. I think this notion is well supported by the thousands of recent orders for and inquiries regarding Titan nodes.
But perhaps most importantly, by farming, you get to be a part of the evolution of the internet and join a global community of amazing people rallied around a shared cause. What could be more worth it than that?
