Public Electrum servers are run by volunteers. Volunteer server operators require modern hardware, which is costly to procure and maintain.
What kind of hardware is required for a typical server? My understanding was that most electrum servers were rented VPS running on a host node in some datacenter somewhere. Are you telling me people are running bare metal servers in their own premises?
In my opinion, operating Electrum servers would be more popular to do if there was a higher chance of receiving BTC donations for doing so.
Yes, that's true but lets be honest here. We now have more servers than we did a year ago. This is partly because more people have gotten into bitcoin and partly because its more affordable to run them because hosting keeps getting cheaper and cheaper as time goes by.
- server ops write a very short "About Me" description, probably < 512 chars
- after Electrum users send coins, declare a >20% chance that an auxiliary menu is displayed if and only if there is a non-zero number of BTC remaining in the wallet less the amount to be sent
- the coins are sent as per usual
- if and only if the menu is to be displayed, it should show the server op's About Me text plus an option to donate, or "No Thanks"
This is great because you get to pitch your case. But I think if you made a small donation a default for every send transaction then that would be even easier for users and would net you more donations. Add a second text field under the fee text field where you can enter a suitable donation to the server operator. There should be a ? button so if anyone is curious what this is they can click on that (you can add your pitch here). Most users are going to leave the value in this field at default which can be 0.0001 or greater.
The question then becomes whether these dust like amounts can be spent by server operators? It should be possible now that default transaction fees in bitcoin core have been reduced to 0.00001. Using compressed addresses will also help.
The alternative would be to implement what multibit is doing:
https://multibit.org/blog/2014/04/11/multibit-hd-brit.htmlThe problem with the above is that one central server can uniquely identify every wallet out there using the britwalletid.