Running witness node only costs a few hundred dollars PER YEAR at present. An RPC node (a node that DApps make remote procedure calls to when they interact with the chain) costs a bit more.
A block is signed once every three seconds or 20 times a minute on Hive. A top 20 witness signs a block thus roughly once a minute. In a year, there are 60x24x365 = 525,600 minutes. The block reward is 0.261 HIVE at present. Thus a top 20 witness gets about 137,200 HIVE as block rewards. The price of HIVE is 0.115 USD at present. Thus a top 20 witness makes about 16,000 USD a year at present. Relative to the cost of running a witness server, witness rewards are plentiful.
Hive should be prepared for onboarding millions of users. But after all these years I would say that some attention to should be paid to how all those users should be onboarded.
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