I am a huge fan of the Mysterium project as a whole and recognize the tremendous value it brings over a traditional VPN. This being said, the pricing needs to come down a bit before it can really bring on mass adoption.
CyberGhost offers unlimited data for as low as $3.95 a month. Granted, this does come with a term 1 year agreement which obviously MysteriumVPN doesn’t come with. Still, I do think that in order for MysteriumVPN, among other Dapps, to take off they can’t just be AS good or NEARLY as good as their web2 competition. They have to be far superior for a more reasonable pricepoint.
What is the major issue?
- Gas Fees?
- Attracting nodes with higher hosting incentives?
- Something else entirely??
Thoughts on the state of this service as well as its future???
The price structure is set by the developers, and they can change it at any time. There is a formula that they use that includes a base price and a multiplicative demand function. Though what they came up with is probably a good first try, it is clear to me that they need to modify the pricing model. The developers really need to reach out to the community to determine what is the most appropriate model, and it is unfortunate that they are not more transparent about this.
First, as you note, if you download alot, Mysterium VPN can be more expensive than a commercial VPN, which usually have unlimited downloads.
Second, as someone who doesn’t download much and only uses a VPN for privacy, it is my opinion that Mysterium is too cheap. This discourages people from running reliable nodes with 100% uptime.
I don’t have a solution, but I think that the developers need to come up with a model that has the following characteristics:
If you use Mysterium 24h per day with low download rates, you should probably expect to pay 5-10 USD per month for a reliable connection. This is more than 6 times cheaper than a commercial VPN.
If you watch a bunch of films online and dowload a few movies per week, you should expect to pay no more than about 25 USD per month for a quality connection, which is more than half the going rate of a commercial VPN.
The fees should be substantially higher for residential nodes, as these people have a substantial risk of being fined by their government, or even being cut off from their ISP. We are seeing in the forums that residential node runners are losing interest in Mysterium because the Cost/Risk ratio is too low.
Poor quality nodes (limited uptime or download rates) should be considerably cheaper than quality nodes.
That’s like trying to compare apples with oranges.
Does CyberGhost give you a residential IP address is it decentralised is it impossible for CyberGhost to log your data?
I would be very curious to see bandwidth, uptime and residential IP to be more rewarded.
That could be amusing with residential+high bandwidth+low ping over here, 2gbps down 600mbps up, 5ms with capital city, myst running in an LXC container in an high availability proxmox cluster.