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If you are looking for quick profit on the short term, then indeed 5000-10000 coins for a masternode is too low, but if you are in for the long term it changes everything. You are talking about how profitable can be a masternode but in your calculations you don't take in account the price fluctuation. For example, let's say you set up a masternode for 10000 coins and it rewards you with 1000 coins a month. If the coins stay at the price you bought them at the first place, then it may not look really profitable indeed, but now if you add the price fluctuation factor to that : Let's do the maths, let's say you bought your 10000 coins for 0,01$ each, your masternode is worth 100$ and 1000 coins rewards per month would be worth 10$. But now, with the development going and the demand and supply changing, imagine that the coin is now worth 1$. If you have hold all your coins until then, you have a masternode which is worth 10k$, add to that all the rewards per months you got so far which are worth 1000$ each, not to mention that you probably put everything at staking and added other masternodes when you got enough to do so. Does it still look not profitable anymore ?
Personally I have already enough coins to set up some masternodes and I will run them on a vps h24 even if it cost me money at first. And I won't pay the vps with the masternodes rewards but with real money. This way I will hold all my coins and when they will be worth a lot more I will have a lot of money. As simple as that. It's a bet on the future, maybe the price won't increase much but maybe it will. In my opinion it will, and I'll do everything possible to make that happen. And I know that I'm not the only investor who plan to do that.
If you are looking for quick profit on the short term, then indeed 5000-10000 coins for a masternode is too low, but if you are in for the long term it changes everything. You are talking about how profitable can be a masternode but in your calculations you don't take in account the price fluctuation. For example, let's say you set up a masternode for 10000 coins and it rewards you with 1000 coins a month. If the coins stay at the price you bought them at the first place, then it may not look really profitable indeed, but now if you add the price fluctuation factor to that : Let's do the maths, let's say you bought your 10000 coins for 0,01$ each, your masternode is worth 100$ and 1000 coins rewards per month would be worth 10$. But now, with the development going and the demand and supply changing, imagine that the coin is now worth 1$. If you have hold all your coins until then, you have a masternode which is worth 10k$, add to that all the rewards per months you got so far which are worth 1000$ each, not to mention that you probably put everything at staking and added other masternodes when you got enough to do so. Does it still look not profitable anymore ?
Personally I have already enough coins to set up some masternodes and I will run them on a vps h24 even if it cost me money at first. And I won't pay the vps with the masternodes rewards but with real money. This way I will hold all my coins and when they will be worth a lot more I will have a lot of money. As simple as that. It's a bet on the future, maybe the price won't increase much but maybe it will. In my opinion it will, and I'll do everything possible to make that happen. And I know that I'm not the only investor who plan to do that.
I'm personally looking to hold for the long term. How many depends on what I see from the dev-team.
Coin price should not enter the calculations. If coins go up, I make a profit even if I don't stake/MN.
But even for the long term, why would I do MN, if it's more profitable to just stake? If the coin goes up, I would still want as many coins as possible.
If you want long term commitment I believe you should set the cost of MN relatively high, so only those who are actually commited buy in.
Also, I have to question your sanity when you are willing to run a VPS w/ MN at a loss. Why not save yourself the money and using the savings to support the coin by buying up coins, and staking them?
Your reasoning is good, but in my example I assumed masternodes would be more profitable than staking, at least at the start and for quite a long time, even with cheap masternodes. Otherwise people will most likely not run masternodes obviously. The problem with high cost for a masternode is that there could potentially be only few masternodes running and the people who will run them will become PieCoin whales due to the huge rewards. I'm against that, I really want every early adopters to be able to buy and run a masternode. Otherwise it will prevent the coin from rising because of the whales which may dump the price with all the coins they will want to sell at any time. And that's not good if we want the project to grow in a steady and healthy way. I have enough coins even if the masternode cost is in the 100k-500k range and I know that I'm not the only one in this case who still want everyone to have a chance to join before the serious things start. I think that if we are a too small community we won't make it, we really need more people to join to make the project successful and I believe masternodes are our chance to do so. However, I don't want to sound too categorical. Even if devs decide to put the cost of a masternode high, I will still support the project. I'm in for the long term, no matter what.
Now about vps, a vps is really cheap (for the founds I have) and I find it a better investment to run a vps with wallet ON h24 in staking or masternode mod rather than buying coins with this money. Especially because I take the future potential coin price in account in my calculations. On top of that, I don't run my computer h24 and I have too many masternodes (from other coins) to manage to run them all on my own computer anyway.