Big ramble incoming, sorry guys.
One big issue is most residentials ISPs don’t even offer static IPv4 addresses anymore instead opting for CGNAT but even if they did no residential ISP is going to assign you more than one static IPv4 (trust me I’ve tried before). This can be bypassed with dyn-dns services or running your own VPS as a proxy but both introduce beforementioned additional points of failure.
Another point to consider is the main point of failure for hosting at home is the uplink. In my case with local ISPs being prone to irregular downtime every couple of weeks to months I’d have to have a fibre or DSL and cable uplink running concurrently or have starlink or maybe LTE/5G as a fall-back but with the way most mobile networks are designed I’m not sure if using them as a fall-back is even a realistic option.
Yet another problem are the costs of all of this. Internet around here is expensive so a fibre/cable dual uplink would cost me ~$140 / month. Masternode hosters charge ~4$ / month / node so even in my case of hardware costs for the nodes adding $0, just the added cost of redundant internet means I’d need to be running 36+ nodes for this to make economical sense.
And since I’d need at least 36 static IPv4 addresses I’d also need to lease my own /26 subnet or an equivalent amount of VPS with dedicated IPv4 addresses which in either case comes at an additional cost of another couple hundred $ per month.
I live in an area where power outages are a once in decade(s) thing but that isn’t a given so you’d need to account for battery backups or generators as well and at this point I am going to stop or the post is going to be the length of your average book.
Just one more consideration: If I or anyone else was running that many nodes at home it’d be a massive risk for both the security of the network as well as the person acting as the operator. With an investment that high getting pose banned simply isn’t an option.
Now sure I am probably an extreme example with internet here being expensive compared to almost any other country but all this long rambling is to say that under current conditions hosting more than one node at home makes absolutely no sense regardless of your motivation, whether it might be to help secure the network or make money off of running nodes.
I really wish it wasn’t so since I am a big fan of running everything I can locally on my own network and machines but I don’t see a way to address this that wouldn’t (in my opinion) cause more harm than good.
The obvious approach is to do away with IPv4 requirements and instead switch to one IPv4 or IPv6 address per node but then you run into the scenario I’ve laid out above where people are going to start running absurd amounts of nodes on a single physical server just to save on costs and at that point it doesn’t matter if it’s running in a datacentre or at home there is no such thing as 100% uptime. It doesn’t matter what it is that fails, be it the RAM, an OS update, the boot drive, etc. Once something inevitably does fail and that server goes down, boom there goes 1% or even more of the entire network in an instant.
Now again maybe I am worrying about something that isn’t an issue or I am overlooking an incredibly simple solution here, but I just don’t see how to make it viable to host more than one node at home without it (again in my opinion) causing more harm than good in other ways. That isn’t to say that centralizing around a few masternode services is doing anything for decentralization or fault tolerance either but my point is that anyone that has enough money to buy tens of thousands of FIRO and is competent enough to pull off hosting more than one or two nodes at home is also competent enough to realize that it makes no sense considering the risks and potential downsides.