Mysterium Network is building a decentralised VPN. If you’re wondering how to sell internet bandwidth and earn crypto, check out our definitive guide to becoming a Mysterium Node.
Before we provide you with our latest update, we’d like to thank our growing community of nodes for their ongoing support, contributions and feedback. We value your time and effort in working with us to launch the next generation of the internet.
What’s changing in our March proposal:
A recurring piece of feedback we had from Mysterium Node Runners was to remove caps on Residential IP nodes which would be paid out monthly. At this stage real traffic is not paid, and completely subsidised by Mysterium Network. We are currently on test net. MYSTT is not a scarce resource as we need an abundance for testing purposes. This means that we will have a lot of users testing our mobile application (and desktop apps in the near future) with free MYSTT. This is necessary for our current stage of testing. This also means a lot of unpaid traffic within Mysterium Network, completely subsidised by us. Before presenting our proposal one of the options we were considering was having a bounty pot that would be split by all node runners. But we came to the conclusion that this would have incited a lot of frustration as there would be no way to guarantee the exact value of earnings until the very end of the month. We are happy to take any suggestions on board that takes us closest to a free market system. This is why we are making an amendment to our March proposal of bounty rules. Instead of having an individual cap of nodes per target region, we will have a total cap of 250 nodes paid out for the following regions: the UK, US, Italy, Germany, Australia, Netherlands. The rest of “Residential IP bounties with payout caps and rolling payments + New countries ” remains the same. To reiterate again – we reserve the right to not pay. We will be cross-checking traffic and identifying bad actors and disqualifying them from our bounty program. 2. Top 3 nodes / region bounties 🌍
For some consumers of Mysterium Network, different types of IPs are both useful and important. This is why we are looking to grow the number of data center, residential IPs, and mobile IPs we have in our network across the globe. Nothing changes with our second bounty.
Overarching themes from feedback gathered from you:
Fix discrepancies as to how data is calculated between my.mysterium.network and our leaderboard on test net.
We will ensure that there will be a single source of truth by the beginning of March. This will be my.mysterium.network
Ensure fair distribution of traffic across all nodes within Mysterium Network
Filters and randomness
Removal of the list of nodes with the ability to favourite nodes within our MysteriumVPN on Android.
Our bounty proposal takes us much closer to real-world environments. We are considering several means of data balancing for nodes but this goes against the ideology of a permissionless network. A consumer will choose nodes that provide stable service at an acceptable price for them. This quarter, we will be focused on growing consumers within the network which will directly impact the volume of traffic flowing through Mysterium Network.
Create more whitelisting tools for node runners
Longer-term (not this quarter), we are working on advanced whitelisting solutions that will be an additional tool that allows providers to grow the volume of traffic they allow through their node. This will also make it much easier for consumers to find nodes providing the type of service they are looking for. This is a huge technical challenge as users do not only browse one service at a given time. This will mean we need multi-hops between data center nodes which provide access to the wider internet. We will also need to ensure that only specific types of traffic are sent to Residential IPs. Another consideration is to have multiple connections to providers so that they are able to browse freely without having to reconnect to nodes based on the specific service they are looking to unblock. This is a huger technical challenge – opening several VPN tunnels to different providers and balancing between them Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post on how we aim to achieve this and the challenges we expect to face.
Provide stable and working Linux software and repositories. Or just remove this platform.
Our Linux node installed via Debian packages or compiled binary on your machine has proven to be the most stable platform for the Mysterium Node.
It seems our community is seeking docker support. There are technical limitations of supporting docker due to the complexity of it’s networking set up. It is possible to run Mysterium Nodes within docker containers. This will work if it is a node with a direct external IP – most likely a data center IP. If it’s a local network set up, our docker support is at beta stage and needs advanced configuration.
Some of you are using install scripts and running it on unsupported platforms. We are only supporting LTS of Ubuntu and Debian at this stage.
We are going to work on our documentation to help our community, but cannot guarantee that this will work with each unique configuration.
Changes of the bounty system need to stabilise as no one is currently able to cost-benefit.
We are currently running the Mysterium Node Pilot as a research and development initiative to understand network dynamics before we move to main net. This means expecting rapid changes.
We will be moving to main net in 2020, and once this happens Mysterium Network will become a peer to peer system. This will mean no more bounty rules and limitations of the number of nodes which are eligible for payouts. This is because in a peer to peer system, you will be paid directly by a consumer of your service. You will also be able to set pricing as you see fit.
We understand that the changes to bounty rules of the Mysterium Node Pilot can be frustrating. If this is the case, we urge you to stay tuned and join us when we’re on main net where you will be able to provide VPN service directly to a free market.
The above is not exhaustive, and all feedback has been shared with our internal teams to help us with prioritising feature updates.
Addressing some repeating questions:
1. What is the MYSTT / gigabyte conversion?One gigabyte will earn you 0.07 MYSTT.
You will earn 0.0005 MYSTT / minute of each session your node accepts.
This is a default setting. In the future, Mysterium node runners will be able to fine-tune and set their own pricing.
2. Will you no longer be paying for any node runner availability? No. Calculation of availability is both difficult and not a real-life scenario. It was temporarily required as our payments system was not ready for testing yet. To reiterate, Mysterium Node Pilot is a Research and Development initiative. This means we are shaping bounty rules based on quickly evolving technology and hope you will stick around for the journey.
Thank you for your contribution to an open internet for all
You can find a detailed break down of both February and March Node Pilot bounty rules on my.mysterium.network. Wondering how to sell internet bandwidth? Start running a node today, and join us as we gear up towards our main net release.