Well, it's not the cheapest BTC transfer fee, but it's a lot more reasonable than some of the other fees I have seen as of late.
Bitconnect member since August 17.

yes, I'd read that watchdog_expired but an updating time was ok, and that's exactly what I've seen on my own MN. I got my first payment today, despite watchdog_expired status.

Nope not at all. I'm in a mining pool and run a masternnode. Most miners use GPUs. I am not most miners... so be it.

there's no ICO - ICO is not the only way to raise capital and interest in a coin.

ok, here are my preliminary findings.

with sentinel:
-sentinel runs [hooray]
-masternode starts [hooray] from wallet on Mac, running on VPS
-Status remains watchdog_expired and the Active time does not change [edit - time is now changing showing it is running, still waiting on watchdog message to change.]

without sentinel running:
--masternode starts [hooray] from wallet on Mac, running on VPS
-Status remains watchdog_expired and the Active time does change [ex: -4m: -3s]

do I need to wait longer with sentinel running for that message and time to change?

sorry, just onboard here and did not see a prior message. But I am going to try the headless version you just posted. Will report as soon as possible, because this is what I'm doing - running it as a headless mn with local wallet (Mac). Thank you.

Funny enough I am having the exact same issue with Sentinel, have my VPS on 16.04 because it's not exactly new, right? cannot get sentinel running at all.
This is my first attempt at a masternode and I'm not a Linux newbie - the instructions remain convoluted at best. It's amazing so many have gotten this far.
Now I have read that even with the watchdog errors it is paying out so I'm going to wait and see but this seems like a very basic issue to resolve.