I wrote in my most recent witness update how, in my opinion, it's not necessary for the witnesses to do all of these things themselves, but just to make sure that they get done. I've considered running a full node, but I realized that the only thing that would really do is look good and get me on these lists.

Just throwing up a full node on a single server isn't sufficient or reliable enough to support any serious projects. I have been pushing for a long time for there to be an enterprise-grade, private, paid Steem node service, but that's prohibitively expensive right now because the tooling isn't there to support it.

$2M / year is an unbelievably high amount for steemit inc to need to spend to run their node. Projects like Jussi and RocksDB were supposed to help bring that down, but from what I've experienced and heard from others Jussi is an absolute mess and after 6+ months of work the requirements for running a full node don't seem to have been reduced at all.

I think it's good that this market downturn has brought all this to a point where it can't be ignored anymore. As a witness, it's my job to make sure that the proper tooling is built to severely reduce the requirements for running Steem nodes and then then make sure that adequate nodes are available to support all projects that want to run on the platform.

I've recently been working with @anyx who is doing some great work towards those goals and we are working on switching steem monsters to use his nodes instead of steemit's in the very near future. I will also do what I can to support him and anyone else who is working to make things better, which I think is a better use of my time and resources than just paying to run yet another full node which can't actually support any serious amount of traffic.