Reflection and Proposal about the community, node centralization and access - OpenDataforWeb3/Resources GitHub Wiki

Discussions about ‘stacks’ have been going on around the community. Much has been thought and said about running our own nodes instead of querying RPC and APIs to get and build with data. We,as a community, on many occasions, have agreed that running our personal nodes at home would be the ultimate way to contribute to the ongoing decentralization, keep privacy and improve performance in our analyses and Dapps.

Knowing these I would like to propose some reflections/discussions. As far as my knowledge goes, today the cheapest hardware needed to run a node would be U$1600, (Avado i7) (please, correct me if I'm wrong) . That could be considered some investment in the northern hemisphere, but kind of doable considering monthly salaries of technology workers. According to glassdoor (in lack of greater source), an entry level Data Scientist in the USA would earn a minimum of U$70K a year, U$5.8k monthly. This hardware would cost 20% of an entry level month payment. Let’s compare it with an example in the southern hemisphere, Brazil. There is no entry level data scientist salary data in glassdoor, but the average indicates U$1.5K. Approximately the price of the node, a whole month payment. This probably resembles reality in other devalued exchange countries. Actually, you will not see African or Latin American countries on top 10 or even top 20 countries in nodes distribution by countries map by the Ethereum Foundation, USA itself centralizes 45% of the nodes.

With that said, it's clear there is a geo-social-political issue regarding node distribution and access around the globe. We, as a community, can ask ourselves then, is the centralization of nodes in rich countries something that the community wants to address? Regarding access, isn't it denied to researchers outside these countries? Aren’t we leaving interesting findings never discovered because of lacking access?

One possibility to temporarily bridge this gap while the ecosystem gets more robust, hardware gets cheaper and shipped to all countries, we could as a community run our node and by demand, via some kind of workflow that researchers could ask for specific data, delivered through decentralized solutions, maybe Ocean protocol. We then would become ‘middle mans’ between researchers and the junk of data they need but for now we could be diminishing the lack of access problem. What does the community think about it?