Does anyone know how much the per-month operating expenses are for a node provider on average? I wonder how much “profit” they are taking from the current ICP remuneration scheme.
In general, I do worry about the NNS minting far more ICP than it burns (at least for now). It appears that we will increase the number of IC nodes from ~500 to ~1300 by the end of the year. Is that because we expect more cycle demand throughout the year, or simply because that was the plan from the start? Does it make sense to instead tie node onboarding (or even voting rewards) with the number of cycles burned?
Even though node rewards are small relative to voting rewards, there seems to be a material difference in their effect on selling pressure: as @mparikh pointed out, node providers must cover their operating expenses and it’s likely at least some of them sell ICP to do so. Thus, it might be sensible to rethink how we set those node rewards.