I get it that the “price” is in a calculation which is used in defining TF/USD in terms of minting, I did see it being used in that context(and I said “for the reward calculation”) and that makes somewhat of a sense to say:
e.g. 10 USD = 1 hour of X machine = X amount of TFT all three being equal and base all other rewards on that (size of machine, etc).
Now that makes sense in an imaginary calculation just for the sake of making things having some baseline context.
What does not make sense is that this is also the current floor price on the market(at least from what I last saw). Because there is essentially no demand for TF capacity which normally would mean that the token price would plummet and “generate” demand. Which means someone is propping the price artificially.
But all this is not answering the very simple question, why is it so expensive? Having a dedicated machine price being “cheaper” does not help it, since many project start small. Then they evolve from that. Then you get to keep them in the environment. Where now you say to anyone renting anything below e.g. 50$/month go away we don’t want your business?
Also, because this is decentralised and you have no idea if a machine will be up next month (the farmer can just pull the plug with no notice), you probably want to deploy the system across multiple machines with redundancy, hence immediately you need to pay at least double(if not triple to be sure) for your deployment and there goes your calculation down the drain. At least on a normal hosting you can have 2 drives and you know if one dies you can ask the datacenter to replace the drive and the issue is fixed. No datacenter would pull a plug on a whole machine without notice and explanation and option to place the drives in a new machine if it e.g. dies. Here in TF you would loose all content, right?
This should shine on small machines/docker deployments. E.g. that I can deploy a single simple docker or a small VM for pennies would be awesome, and would drive innovation and new people on the project. And right now you have all the capacity and nobody is using it because it’s too expensive because you want the farmers to be happy. Well eventually you won’t be able to sustain to pay the farmers because there won’t be any more people buying into the token. Which is about the only reason someone would want to buy the token now… just hope for a “bull-run” because they see a growing number of farmers, right? I mean I don’t see much action in the forums with people asking questions on how to deploy, etc… one would expect the amount of devs dabbling with the project would equal the number of farmers, at least.
I’m not saying all this to bash on the project, I’m saying this because I’m genuinely interested in the project getting off the floor and actually using it for some of my projects because technically so far what I saw seems workable. Since I bought into the L0 validator scheme I would also loose $ if the TFT price would drop, so I’m advocating against myself here… in the short term.