Happy Monday everyone, I'm going to have a lot of math in this one so please bear with me. Also, once again, none of this should be construed as financial advice and I am not a financial advisor. Please make your own best decisions for what you want to invest in. 

Presearch

I'm assuming that most readers know what Presearch is, (if you don't then please consider using my referral link to check it out, it's free and we both get 25 PRE). But to clarify, I believe that Presearch is not just a web browser, but a whole new way of protecting and managing our data, or really, an advent for web3. Essentially the way that it works is that when a Presearch user searches/accesses something on the internet, it gets routed through different nodes, which allows the data and metadata to be construed or pretty much masked. In some similar ways to things like the Brave browser or Swash data or control of data and how it is monetized is put more in the hands of the user, and as a result users can earn tokens/money/crypto as compensation. 

Nodes

With Presearch, people can not only earn tokens to searching, but they can also earn tokens for running a node. I've seen quite a few good articles out there (Latetotheparty I'm talking to you) about getting a node setup so I'm not going to be going into detail on the steps, but for the purposes right now, all you need to know is that a Node requires at least 2000 PRE staked, and if you don't want to dedicate a separate machine to run the node (or if you don't want to pay the electricity costs), you need to have a VPS as well too. 

Is running a node worth it?

So this is going to involve a bit of math. 

I initially spent a good chunk of time on this one compiling different anecdotal reports (mostly on reddit) for how much PRE people said that they made over the past year, and they varied...a LOT. For instance, someone claimed that they made around 800 PRE over the course of 6 months, which is roughly about 1600 PRE ($400USD) a year. $400 is roughly 3 times my estimate! And on the other hand, there was another report of someone saying that they only accumulated roughly around 16 PRE a month, which is about 192 PRE a year ($48 USD). Therefore, I really tried to only rely on actual screenshots that people would post, and also whether or not they indicated that they had their nodes running 24/7. 

With about 7 data points, my average came out to about 10.5 PRE/week, and this roughly fell in line to what many people said, which is that most people can expect 1-2 PRE a day.

Making 10.5 PRE a week puts you at about 45.5 PRE a month. 

This comes out to about 10.5 x 52 = 546 PRE a year 

Assuming that PRE continues to hover around $.25, this comes to roughly $136.50. Now I would have the option of running this off of my own server, but I think my wife would kill me because of the electricity costs, so I'd most likely have to get a VPS, which from the bare-bone cheapest I could find, was about $12 a year, making the $136.50 actually come out to $124.50 of profit a year.

Now let's plug this into an APY calculator: 

So just so we're all tracking the same figures, this assumes a 24.90% APY on my original investment of about $500USD (2000 PRE), and at the end of 1 year. Another consideration to make is that the interest doesn't compound, and the amount you stake doesn't compound either. So you're stuck with a fixed 24.90% APY with really no compounding frequency. 

Now of course, I'm making some BIG assumptions with my calculations, for instance:

1) The price of PRE will remain constant around $.25: Obviously it's really hard to tell what's going to happen in the future, but I'd like to believe however that things like Presearch will get even more popular and prevalent with web3, as people will want to have more control and/or privacy in regards to their data. 

2) That my PRE yield is even accurate at all: I've come up with an average of making 10.5 PRE a week. If I incorporated more anecdotal stories, this could have been a lot more, or a lot less. 

3) That I can do math correctly: Math was actually my worst subject in school. And FYI I'm Asian. 

So am i going to do this? 

I am in general excited about the whole idea and goals behind Presearch, so just in the fundamentals themselves I would be willing to invest in. Also, I think $500 isn't too much to take a gamble with. So as of right now, I'm leaning towards a yes. 

But I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts on this. Have you run your own node(s)? Are my numbers way off the mark? Do you agree with my wife when she says I'm throwing my money away?