Hey @nickvasilich,
I get what you’re saying. If there are only 80 slots and 1500 validators, earnings go down. And, that means it’s harder to make your investment back as a validator, especially when you pay for VPS hosting. That can hurt validators.
Rest assured, we have all thought about it. More discussion is always welcome, just know this:
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There is a plan to increase slots by April 2021, when we’ve completed consensus v2, randomness v2, etc, less than a year away. Slots per shard will increase, and number of shards will increase. Soon enough, there will be more than 16,000 available slots, and probably not enough validators. So we have to work as hard as we can to bring as many validators as we can by that time.
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Slots cycle, so the number isn’t the only important thing. It depends how fast the epochs pass by, and how many transactions there are to process. With more transactions, validators will earn more. And the team isn’t just focused on adding validators, they’re working hard to increase transaction and trading volume too.
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If the VPS server is too expensive, there are much less expensive options available, and you don’t have to use JServers if you don’t want. Contabo or any other works as well.
It can be frustrating now, but you will earn even before we add slots. And you can stop being a validator now, and come back when slots open up, but you’ll miss out in the meantime. I don’t like to focus on this, but if PRV price were to continue to increase, being a validator as that happens would be great. Now, I am 100% certain price will also go down as well. So it’s up to you whether you unstake. I personally wouldn’t, but I can see why one would. If I did, I’d at least hang on to the PRV needed to stake. Who knows what it would cost to stake 1750 later. Maybe more, maybe less.
Anyway, that’s the info I have. There are no guarantees, and I’m not suggesting you take a certain course of action, but hopefully some of that info was helpful.