Ecash payments don’t work. Relays being paid per connection or per event is not a sustainable model as the cost for the operatoe is mostly the same even if you post 50 times a day or 1.
And $0.5/mo doesn’t work unless you have millions and millions of users that all pay *to a single service*.
No one selling it for that cheap will provide you a quality service.
You also can’t reach the required scale for economies of scale without people paying for relays *now*.
it sounds all cool and all, until you realize the ecash is no different than topping up your account. (advance payment).
what account? There is no account with this scheme
ecash based models tie prices to nonsense metrics that push high activity users away while undercharging low activity users
even though they use a similar amount of resources in the grand scale of things, which is not correlated to “activity” measured in events
running a relay shouldn't cost $500k/mo tho
you have fees, taxes, customer support, the volume of data at that many users is huge, software devs etc.
and then there needs to be money left to reinvest into the product
my point is that business always has two sides. if your service is economically efficient, seemingly trivial payments might add up. but i agree that there's a minimum necessary volume
currently 10k users throwing $0.5/mo would hardly fund 1 full time dev and servers including taxes and lost opportunities in other work areas
do you need $5k/mo in hardware? yes, paying a dev salary has been exceedingly difficult for over a decade, but i wouldn't expect a relay to need full time support? dunno. i have 128 epyc cores, 1TB of RAM, and 20 TB of disk space for less than $5k up front 🤷
You don’t need $5k/mo just for HW. You need it for HW + dev combined.
You’d need some level of redundancy and customer support as well, and to be able to dedicate enough time to it which could mean dropping a job.
I use 1 paid relay and run 1 paid relay. Everyone who runs a start9 should run a relay and have the meetup figure out how to include it in dues or something. Relays absent a group or business are dumb imo.
