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It's not only about earning enough for the hardware, it is about the admin overhead to do it. It also sets a bad precedent that is not scalable, Steemit Inc has many times more stake than the witnesses have and they are struggling, one should not increase witness overhead so that bidbots can be more profitable off of free infrastructure. Basically witnesses provide core blockchain functions, much like local town councils provide basic amenities communities require, such as roads, refuse removal, town planning, bylaws etc, but they don't provide electricity for free to businesses and households, which wouldn't be sustainable.

For bidbot this is true they can pay such servers, but there are a lot of free services here that rely on this free infrastrustur

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Agreed, the issue is that when you provide a public rpc node there is no easy way to identify and limit or exclude users, it's kind of all or nothing. The minute you make a node public all the freeloaders pile on and the node is bogged down to a crawl and the only recourse you have is to constantly tweak rate limiting or add more nodes to the cluster as Steemit does.

The key is to educate both the services and the consumer to switch buying habits, ie to not use services that freeload off of public infra when they can afford it, much like you would not purchase products where animals have been harmed in testing or products that have non-recyclable packaging.

I wonder if app operators, especially those benefitting stake delegations would consider beneficiary for node access.

And how that would work out financially. Because the “benevolent” model doesn’t work freely. Inflationpool is of course an issue in a beneficiary model but would definitely be worth doing some math on to check the finances.

I am not an expert in this so I will believe what you said, but this reeducation is not that simple, you see it IRL, not everyone is buying the bio Or fair trade stuff.

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That's why there is "hard reeducation" and "soft reeducation". Changing company habbits is easy by just turning off these public clusters. These would then have to educate the consumers that there is nothing for free.

There is no such thing as free.

But are these services economically sustainable then?
Shouldn't they develop a business model which allows this?
Advertisements, Freemium, Premium models?

In my point of view (as a customer) I prefer a service that is down 3 days in the year then a service I have to pay for. And so the people will always go to the cheapest one.

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There are no free services. You always pay one way or the other. Either you pay with your data, or you pay with watching advertisements or the big premium users pay for the small free users. There is no free lunch.

Where does someone pay on things like Steemnova, ocdb, steemd Or steemworld?

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Steemnova is not even tied to the steem blockchain, they don't use any API at all. The others, you don't pay yet, because they have very little costs since they can use Steem as a free backend.
Steemd, Steemworld and ocdb could: Add Advertisements, Premium services or survive through tipping (donations).

Or beneficiary requirements.

Posted using Partiko Android

How do they pay for their web hosting, etc.?

There are always costs somewhere, and someone is paying them. Perhaps they are low and someone can cover them as a hobby. Perhaps (as with AWS) a free tier can allow small projects to get started without immediate payment. All of these are sensible models, but just assuming it is or should be 'free' is not a sensible model.

So then, in that model, you get a total of 20 nodes. That's not enough.

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