...has anyone tried running a Masternode off of a smartphone? I have a Samsung Note 3 and Note 2 and a couple of high end tablets.... I mean most of these new smartphones/tablets are pretty powerful. I have them sitting around doing nothing. thoughts?
Bad idea.
First, masternodes secure the network by having 100% uptime. While theoretically possible to run the daemon it will hurt the network when it periodically goes offline. We are building a reliable network that should have nodes in professional data centers, not phones or even home networks.
Second, if your node goes dark for 70 minutes (I think), you will move to the back of the payment queue and start the cycle over again.
Smartphones are pretty expensive for a server, even if they were better. You can run a node on a PI (similar ARM chips as in phones) but the internet service needs to be reliable and a datacenter can do that better and usually with cheaper IP addresses.
I would like to see a backup IP address option. So when your node goes offline it can fallback to a second IP running a redundant node and stay online. Similar to websites that link to more than one IP so they can stay online even with high traffic or maintenance.
I absolutely agree... Smartphones are a quite pricey.... I just go through a lot of them... At least one a year... Currently Note 5 which I may retire for Nexus next go around. It's not practical to use them for the masses due to cost... But In my case I do have them lying around or streaming music. I did look into those pi machines and that's super cool. I could buy a few for the price of my note 5 lol.