Well, I am running a node (@atexoras.witness) in New Zealand, that currently is still private, but under the hood I am helping users to understand more HIVE with a bit of twist of enjoyment and free stuff along the way with the only (that I am aware) Virtual Pub in HIVE. @atexoras.pub
Have a look when you have the chance and let me know any questions if you have. This was a returning experience from the times of steem... where I have attempted to run a witness node too, but it was way more hardware demanding.
Note: I am not providing any public RPC or seed node yet. Although, once I move to a dedicated node, that might change, depending on how much that affects my home network. Full decentralization will happen once people understand they can run a node from home. If needed, I can help with that part too.
What kind of system requirements does one need to have to run a node at home, and what are the payouts for running a node?
The produced blocks depend a lot on how high you are in the queue (aka how many people are voting for you), so it's not a static thing. But if you wanna have a rough estimate "starting" like my @atexoras.witness that is running a node since the beginning of the year, so a month. And from all the signed blocks, so far, I have received around 15 HIVE. Hive from blocks signed go directly to powered up HIVE.
But, in my view, I would not be thinking of running a node for profit. To be honest, the real reason for me, was because I needed more decentralized access to HIVE (reaching my node instead of reaching a node 20 000 KM from me, makes a huge difference). Hence add another node to the ecosystem, that currently only serves me, but if things evolve into the right path, I will then be exposing my node, so others can benefit too. For example, people in New Zealand, Australia, and all islands around. Which will benefit from shorter interaction with my node, as compared with others further away. This is the natural path of decentralization... we get bigger and more options and fewer single points of failure.
Resources-wise, if you have a very good IO subsystem (very low latency, live NVMe's) you can run everything from storage, hence you can easily start a witness node with 2 or 4 cores and 4GB of RAM. Even less most likely but you should understand that replaying the blockchain will consume 1 thread for the entire process plus something else for IO depending on your storage configuration/type.
If you deploy what is called the shared memory file into memory (using a ramfs filesystem), then you will need around 20-21GB of ram JUST for this file alone. So, I would say, at least 24GB VM or System. CPU wise here, you will want the highest clock CPUs possible because all you want is reduced latency. 4 might be a good core count, but you won't be using lots of it most of the time. It depends on who will be using the node. If just for signing blocks, it will use almost no CPU. HIVE code is super efficient at the moment.
Finally, I would definitely recommend starting with things on a Virtual Machine (cheap one) if you wanna just give it a try and then move to a physical one. But if you already have a physical one doing nothing, then you can use that too. Physical vs Virtual will always be best, because of the extra latency (even if not much) the hypervisor introduces. But, for most cases (like just signing blocks) it will be negligible.
Have fun! 😎 HIVE rocks!
Is there a page that shows someone like me how to get started? I have a desktop machine that I don't use for much. It is an older machine that I would likely need to upgrade, but that's something I've been considering anyway. I probably wouldn't go less than 32GB of Ram, just because I want a clean experience on my system and it would likely be a i7 at worst, so the demands don't sound like they'd weigh my machine down. Does running a node weigh down the internet connection much? My family does enjoy our Netflix!
Searching through posts (use ecency search bar for example), you can find lots of good ones. Some examples I grabbed from a post of mine:
And no, it should consume
very littlesome bandwidth, but nothing that a +20Mbit connection can't deal with (check my other comment).I don't have number right now, but for a witness node is very little.With exception of the initial download of the blockchain which is a little bit more than 500 GB.You're awesome...looks like I'll get a separate hard drive for this, too...I've got some homework to do...
There you go...
A week worth of traffic (includes a hungry Hive-Engine node feeding on it):
Upload 7.23 GB
Download 29.00 GB
Total 36.22 GB
Thank you so much!