Hi @colossus. This is indeed a good time to think expanding. When you start / expand farming now you will get the token listing value set at 8 cents. This is a very low price to get a 60 month fix on. Having said that I do get your concern, expanding costs money and that additional OPEX has to be covered somehow.
We’re in a very exciting phase of the where it is a chicken and egg problem. The TF Grid is beta but stable enough to run simple workloads. We get tremendous responses from the like of owncloud and presearch because it simplifies setting up node (single site, single instance) for their communities a lot. Singe click deployment almost on a servers / region of your choice. For these it doesn not matter (besides having a dedicate IPv4) whether they run from the home or a mode professional data-center.
For larger installations, read enterprise workloads, archive, backup, multi-site installations, we ge a lot of interest from Enterprises that see the benefit of breaking out of the walled gardens of market leading clouds and to be able to claim true data sovereignty and governance. For this we need more traditional datacenter based installations (which is what I believe you are building).
The chicken and egg is that we need a sizable grid to be taken serious but this creates farmers that hold the key to the project with regards to token value (eg. speculation / dumping or not). Vesting has been a mechanism to “damp” the speculative aspects of the digital currency markets and provide a stable, appreciating token based on real utility, a utility that serves a for ever growing need om planet earth.
The majority of the community we currently have are all on board with making this a great project and therefore will not dump tokens and damage the project, so the question is do we need vesting as a protection mechanism? It certainly does not help you to come on board and helping solving the sizing issue.
So what to do? I think a workable solution would be to have a percentage of the minted tokens lockup (automatic vesting) and the remaining not. This would create relief for operational costs if you want to cover that with a token amount. What do you think?