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Comment by bouncycastle | Hacker News Reader

Reality check time!

- Raspberry Pi is way underpowered to run any SaaS on.

- There are no 5g providers that would accept bitcoin as payment. Highly unlikely there ever will be any.

- Bitcoin's network is too congested for it to be used for trivial payments such as subscriptions for SaaS.

- A bitcoin node takes hundreds of GB of storage itself. Bandwidth costs will probably be significant too. This means the SaaS would probably have a hard time getting to break-even.

- It may be more profitable to climb up the tree and steal the pi and then take its bitcoin private key (assuming there is a hot wallet). Competing SaaS may also look for rivals and take them down.

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> - Raspberry Pi is way underpowered to run any SaaS on.

Probably sufficient if it's written in Go or another compiled language. Obviously depends on how much revenue you're making per hit, but certainly within the realm of possibility.

> - Bitcoin's network is too congested for it to be used for trivial payments such as subscriptions for SaaS.

There are alternative coins that would work quite well, if fees/txn is the concern. Current fees seem to be about $1.15/txn, which is quite high if you're only charging $5-10.

> - A bitcoin node takes hundreds of GB of storage itself. Bandwidth costs will probably be significant too. This means the SaaS would probably have a hard time getting to break-even.

Few people run a full bitcoin node, so I think it would be sufficient for this use-case to send txns to the network via a third-party service.

> - It may be more profitable to climb up the tree and steal the pi and then take its bitcoin private key

Honestly the human factor involved in the whole scheme is probably the hardest thing to make happen. There's maintenance, h/w failure, the difficulty of finding trustworthy contractors who don't need human guidance, etc.

Good points. The only thing I'll disagree here is that using Go doesn't make it magically faster. The SD card is also a performance bottleneck for any database intensive work. Although, some services may still be viable such as a VPN service maybe?

> - Raspberry Pi is way underpowered to run any SaaS on

Our MVP SaaS product was done on a Pi (Node.js backend), and several of our launch customers were using it before we deployed them to production. Helped us simulate micro instances and write more efficient code as we started to scale.

Definitely doable, but not for something as crazy as running Asana or Zendesk over.

> Raspberry Pi is way underpowered to run any SaaS on.

Depends. Here's a random SaaS which I assume is making money:

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/11984

A URL shortening service. Yeah, I'm thinking this could fit on a Pi. Database and everything on the SD card. Latency won't be great, but it should be possible, especially if you rewrote it in Rust.

It doesn't have to run a Bitcoin fullnode. It can run a SPV wallet which would take a few megabytes if that.

> take its bitcoin private key

Generate and store the key in a Hardware Security Module

The biggest killers are related to BTC. It would be difficult to pay for 5G with BTC (although there probably could be workarounds like how Purse.io has humans with credit cards buy your Amazon shopping carts in exchange for your BTC) and also difficult to get subscription revenue in BTC. Something like Libra could solve all these problems.

> Raspberry Pi is way underpowered to run any SaaS on.

Now there's a sentence that triggered a lot of anecdotes to prove the contrary lol!

I gather that while it is indeed possible, I have my doubts as to how practical or economic it might be. Anyone willing to accept the challenge? ;)

Who would pay for a URL shortening service, especially one that can lose your URLs?

Maybe? But only if it ran on a tree and was powered by the sun

Dream killer. Username doesn't check out. =]

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