It used to be around €1500 for a full node that could be shared by up to 4 stakers. Staking is different from mining coins though. You put tokens into some sort of holding and keep ownership of them. You then “mine tokens” by having the node do work while it is holding your stake.
The idea is decent in theory, but not in execution. The idea is that token staking is done by node operators which makes it much harder to pull of 51% attacks as it requires hundreds of euros in money to be put aside. It also protects against poisoned nodes, which is theoretically possible on something like Tor because of how easy it is to spin those up for cheap. Besides that the token also funnels a tiny amount back towards the developers in an anonymous way that would help them during development.
In practice though they should have just went without the blockchain. I have been very interested in Session but their blockchain model was always one of the biggest things that might kill the whole project.
AI related repos getting flooded with AI PRs. The world is beautiful.
No, it’s free. They have a whitepaper on their website: https://getsession.org/whitepaper
All in all there’s a pool of tokens that gets paid out to the stakers. The full network of nodes determines what nodes are eligible by testing each other. The pool gets a constant flow of tokens over time, while transaction fees and specific purchases (like a custom username instead of one of those long IDs) feed the pool as well.
Keep in mind I’m not here to sell it. I really wish it was more like free Tor nodes, in which case I would be hosting one already.