Are 3Nodes "worth it"?

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 :slightly_smiling_face: ).

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?

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Thank you so much @Scott for putting the time and effort in to writing down another great piece to give our audience a wider point of view … I couldn’t agree more that it is FULLY WORTH IT to get involved in Threefold the one way or the other… 3nodes are definitely a great options … let’s expand the Grid together :slight_smile: :smiley:

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I love the mission of the project and the active farmers. Purchasing a Titan is pretty expensive. I did a pre-order though via bank transfer but may not proceed with it after finding out that PERHAPS I can create 2 nodes for the price of one Titan with getting my own set-up. Planning to give one node to my daughter since only one node is allowed per ISP. I’m new to this creating your own mining rig. I currently have one Helium hotspot but I like the idea of having my own hardware. Besides the Titan only comes with a 2 yr warranty and what’s my recourse for any hardware issues? I’d appreciate your thoughts. I live in the US. Thanks!

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Hey @Chynn7,

Welcome to the ThreeFold community :wave:

First, let me just clarify that there is no hard limit to the number of nodes you can run from a single internet connection. The only consideration is having enough available bandwidth to support the amount of storage contained in all of the nodes.

DIY is a great route if you don’t mind plugging some components together and doing just a bit of setup.

In case you haven’t seen them, here are a couple threads with more info on DIY:


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Sure thing @karoline, and thank you for reading :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks So much for the info. May I ask what’s your hardware setup that you’re able to run 2 nodes on one computer? I would like to create a node for POP network and Threefold on same computer. POP is similar to Theta. I got the required 50k tokens to run one. Thanks again for the links. I haven’t checked them so I apologize if I’m redundant.

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Sure thing. The hardware is just what I’ve shown in the post. What makes this work is that ThreeFold’s Zero OS can run other node software, or any Linux workload for that matter. The trick is just getting the pieces to fit together. Zero OS is a bit different than your typical operating system, so deployments can require a bit of creativity.

From what I can see, POP provides code and/or binaries for Linux, so it should run on your 3Node. I’ll be releasing some guides soon on how to make the software work for these setups. There’s a couple features I’m working to get implemented which will make this much easier to do.

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