If Justin bolts because STEEM goes below 1 cent, it will be only good for the ecosystem. Getting rid of Justin under any circumstances would be a cause for celebration.

According to @aggroed, running a full node costs $20 a month after MIRA was implemented. That's a like cable subscription.

More importantly than the right this second discussion is that MIRA seems pretty close. MIRA allows nodes to run with data that's currently stored in ram to be stored on hard drives. The difference in cost for that is staggering. A full node would drop from 512Gb of Ram to closer to 8 or 16 Gb. The server would go from something like $650/month to something closer to $20/month. Witness nodes are gonna be less. So, now run the math again. If it only costs $20 a month and yeah you probably run 2 for $40/month as long as you can make more than $480/yr there will be people willing to donate time to run them. Post MIRA the discussion of closing my witness starts if steem hits 0.004 cents per steem.

See: https://steempeak.com/steem/@aggroed/steem-is-dead-or-is-it