Folks,
We are not going to attract farmers with this TFT valuation. The monthly cost of farming far exceeds the rewards.
Developing the grid is one thing, but you really need to start marketing this project before it dies from undervaluation.
My 1.3 cents …
Farming costs far exceed rewards
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Well, should we attract farmers with the current utilization amount?
Thanks for your feedback @TFFarmer.
Indeed, as of now, there is more farming offer than utilization demand.
So you are right by saying that the current TFT valuation wouldn’t attract more farmers.
I think the TF team will soon announce several news to show how the TF Grid is growing and how this could attract more TFT demand. There are many great projects in the making and many upcoming ways to attract more users. This should be communicated more thoroughly.
When more users come in, the TFT price should follow and then more farmers will be attracted to bringing 3nodes on the grid.
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Hi - long time no speak! Hope you are well. I understand your concerns and agree that the current token price is low. We have not done much to boost token pricing with market making activities for good reasons which means we still have a clean and undervalued token. In order to change this we need to work together with the community - again decentralization also means that the progress of the project and therefore token price cannot depend on what the founding organization does. It needs the effort an input from all of us.
What I am tasked with with a number of people around me is the following:
- build a service provider model where it proves that anyone can create a service model on top of this grid if she/he put in the effort to do it. It will be done in such a way that all the steps required, payment facility from Fiat, internal deployment funding with tokens / wallets, all tooling to deploy and model, etc etc are going to be make available as a multistep, multi-video tutorial how to create your own service provider business.
- to boost this - the next release will include a service provider claim (tokens) in the smart contract payment. Remember, 50% of all payments is not allocated and (with DAO approval) service providers are able to make a claim for that 50% to earn (next to a fiat earning model, or a farming earning model).
All this is not for TF to build a service provider doing it all, it to proof that it is viable today to build a business on the grid in it current guise. Whoever feels that she/he wants to be involved in this from the start, please contact / DM me.
PS> The fiat that TF will make in this demonstration service provider company will be reinvested in the community (FIAT) to get a targeted jobs / activities done. More details to come, I am jumping the gun a little here but a very important pillar to get the token price to move is to start utilization everywhere.
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I can also jump in here. I am really new member here, started to farm just last year.
Currently my setup is bringing me in negative every month. It’s not a lot, but still it’s negative.
I am located in EU and electric bill is just crazy. I know exactly how much my setup costs every month (I have a smart plug with electric counter) but I have built my setup in most efficient way possible (regular PC case, low rpm fans, ssd’s only. whole setup is located in coldest room) for long run.
Said that, I haven’t sold any of my tokens yet. I am keeping them for the future, but I have to decide for myself what would be the timeframe where I have to review running my node.
Of course everyone knows the market situation and TFT is in the same room. It seems like having as many real-world use cases for TFT would be a great way to push up the usage. I really like the Mastodon deploy possibilities, however, I think we would need to simplify setup process as much as possible, just like regular hosting services offer to launch wordpress for noobies with a few clicks without going through technical aspects like ram sizes, ip configs, etc.
In any case, this is topic I am interested to follow on.
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Thanks for your feedback @mrpresident.
Concerning Mastodon, have you seen this following link?
https://getmastodon.threefold.io/
Also this link from the manual.
The process of setting up a Mastodon server is now much simpler.
Get ready for a surprise in the coming couple of weeks… 
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Very nice! Then we need to be more vocal about this!
Its in beta, I think they will be once testing is done soon.
Hello , i don’t understand why we don’t use collateral to run a node , this is the use case for crypto node project and help a lot the token price…look at flux for example.
i bought 100k TFT at 0.12$ and now i have 1/10 for my initial investment, if this tokens are not needed for collateral , why i should keep them…?! as I earn lot of TFT every month without any need of collateral?!
I’m at both ends, farmer and builder. I have one Titan node, with current TFT value only electricity might be covered. I’m also hosting some service for my community. Can’t do it on my own node, haven’t got ipv4. I’m renting a VM, but even with current low TFT I can still find something cheaper at a regular hosting provider (5 euro per month for what I need). I might be able to reduce cost by downsizing and some staking. Having a dedicated node is overkill for my small workload.
So in short: TFT is too low as a farmer, TFT is too high as a buider.
For now, being part of building a new internet is holding me back to abandon Threefold, as builder and/or farmer.
That just an intro price, looks more expensive after that, or similar.
Now that i started deploying stuff I’m a bit surprised by Scott’s other thread where it seems utilization has come down. Ow wait, it may be a couple extra nodes?
Anyways; do we have an idea on the relation between a certain % of utilization and the token price rising? In other words; can we set some some sort of goal?
There’s probably some economic model if you could figure out the monthly selling pressure, which seems steady. I think we need $20k in TFT utilization sales per month judging by payday volume. I do not know what that is % wise. Rising % would also increase speculation though.
PS. With the help of Parkers we got another Mastodon server running on a node at social.hostservice.nl as a demo for over a week now. Wasn’t completely without challenges but we learned a lot too.
My 2 cents; make sure you have 100% working SMTP solution.
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I’m going to make a post about smtp specifically, it’s a difficult topic for everyone not just the grid, for instance MOST isps block outbound smtp ports on all residential connections.
And MOST centralized email services won’t accept emails from servers without pointer records that Have to be configured by the isp providing the IP address .
As it stands there Is not a viable solution to reliable smtp hosting on the grid that is likely to work for most farms. I have some ideas on a solution, but it a big project. More to come.
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Some interesting discussion I’m catching up on here. I ran a ballpark figure on the simulator and adding the CUs corresponding to 10,000 cpu cores of utilization would mean close to $20k/month TFT demand. This corresponds to about 15% utilization of the grids CPUs (other amounts, especially HDD could be lower), and likewise about a 10x growth from present numbers.
To your question @RobertL, utilization has been dropping both in absolute and percentage terms over the last few weeks. So for any new deployments that were created, a greater number were taken offline.
This is a really incredible price for a VPS with these capabilities, although I did find mention that Strato uses a shared kernel so it’s not quite the same product as our full VMs. The typical cost for a VM with 2 cores is around $20 per month or more (from Vultr, Digital Ocean, or Racknerd, for example). I see Hetzner has a comparable offering, and Contabo also has some very cheap options starting in larger sizes. Thanks for the data point, which we should definitely consider when setting the prices going forward.
By the way, the price of deployments is always figured in dollar terms, and the number of TFT billed changes accordingly. There a proposal and some discussion here around changing this so the purchasing power of TFT, and discounts based on holding TFT, are maintained.
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This is so funny, showing (again) my age here: In the early days of the Internet every one (enterprise / business) had their own mailserver. This was considered to be one of the most / core internet service ran by independent (we call that decentralized now) oranisations. I spent my early days in my worklife in a space technology company (first as a mechanical engineer, later to return as a unix systems administrator for their SGI and Sun simulation real estate).
Email servers were done in such a way that they were serving company email domains, onsite, 100% private. Fast forward to know, everyone uses one of the monopolies on the internet and we allows them to read through emails to gain information about us (because we consume the email service for “free”. Sidenote, met Eric Allman in those days at the NLUUG (NL Unix User Group) meeting…
Email is something considered complex but is not and through this thread I have not taken up the gauntlet to bring email back to what it was: by people for people. It’s not that complicated to get an email service up and running that services a couple of email domains and nothing else. This can be run on the grid, we can create a specific (minimal flist) and get back our freedom with regards to sending and receiving emails.
Thank you for the inspiration!
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The situation is not really improving. Apart from the farmerbot that saves me on the energy bill (but also eats into the rewards for some reason), the TFT value has gone down by 40% since my first mention of the profitability here.
I remember we used 8 cents as the basis to calculate the rewards on, but now that we are below 1 cent, that is not really realistic anymore…
So we either need to change that, or try to give the token some value.
I have been following the project for almost 6 years now, and the token price has been on a steady decline all the time.