I seem to recall that people are setting up VPSs for around $20 per month or $240 per year, which is double the cost of setting up a Raspberry Pi for a year as outlined above. Thus while NXT is at its current $0.04 each, capturing NXT with VPSs is a break-even proposition.
These are actually great numbers. The return-on-investment or ROI for forging NXT is positive NOW and will be even more profitable when NXT coins become more valuable. Thus even with NXT as a Proof-of-Stake coin without mining, there is STILL financial motivation for people to run the nodes required to keep the NXT system going. For a pre-mined coin, that is a remarkable statement.
Oh and the daily cost of the NXT support web running on 300 Raspberry Pi nodes is $36,000 / 365 = $98.63 per day. Do it on 300 VPSs instead, and the daily NXT support web cost is around $200 per day.
Ricky, I don't follow and clearly am missing some key info here... I hold 7,000 NXT. I can average about a 5 NXT forge with my account.
What does adding a Pi do? Does each Pi allow an opportunity to forge with an additive effect?
There's an additive effect for you only if each client you run on your Pis are all loaded with 7000 NXT that is your baseline.
The "dirty little secret" of NXT forging is that your ability to forge NXT is directly dependent on and directly proportional to how many NXT you have loaded on your forging rig - Raspberry, VPS, whatever- and what proportion that amount is compared to the TOTAL of all NXT on ALL forging rigs. Somebody with millions of NXT on their forging rigs is going to get most of the blocks/transaction fees, and hit very frequently. Somebody with only 7000 NXT is only going to forge a very few blocks/transaction fees only once in a great while (over a hundred times less often than somebody with a million NXT in their forging rig).
NXT forging for capturing transaction fees is not a democratic lottery, it is an oligarchy. All Raspberry Pis strengthen the NXT node network; the Raspberry Pis loaded with the most NXT while providing that support are rewarded most for their network support. With apologies to George Orwell, "All Raspberry Pis are equal, but some Raspberry Pis are more equal than others".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy