I really loved this post by @apshamilton who is looking at and potentially testing different machines that could run these nodes... Potentially if lots of people had reasonable-quality inexpensive servers available then we might not need a few people to run these prohibatively expensive $12k a month servers. It's definitely a very interesting proposition and definitely something I'm sure a few of us might consider to help out next time we're shopping for a new PC. If we could get a hundred or thousand people all running Steem, then Steemit Inc can seriously concentrate solely on coding the protocol.

I'm not technical, but I love the action everyone has been posting about this week... sometimes it takes some fear to motivate in the right direction.