Hello everyone!
I am Joey Kuhnsman from Tampa, Florida. I operate and maintain the ftkuhnsman orchestrator set up on the Livepeer Network.
I am a blockchain enthusiast eager to get involved with projects that provide real purpose and utility value to the blockchain community. Livepeer certainly fits that criteria. I decided to participate in Livepeer because I see the value it provides, enabling companies and/or individuals alike to stream live video in a highly accessible and affordable manner. I see it as a disruptive technology that will reshape the future of live video.
Over the last few years I have been accumulating GPUs to mine ethereum, but have decided to find a new purpose for my hardware. I initially setup the ftkuhnsman orchestrator with one GPU as an experiment, largely to get familiar with the technology. I have now employed all of my available GPUs and will continue to expand by reinvesting future rewards.
Full transparency, I am relatively new to Livepeer and still learning. I am open and eager to get your feedback on my current setup / reward and fee structure, especially ways you think it can be enhanced.
Overview of my current setup
Orchestrator
The orchestrator is setup on a Vultr VPS located in Atlanta, Georgia datacenter. The VPS runs the latest version of Livepeer on Ubuntu 20.04 x64. Livepeer has been daemonized and verbosely logged, and I have fully configured Grafana, enabling me to easily monitor system health and get alerted to errors to minimize downtime. I believe transparency is the best policy, so if you decide to stake with ftkuhnsman and would like the ability to see the orchestrator logs and Grafana dashboard in real-time I am happy to grant you read-only access.
Currently have a Geth light node running on the orchestrator VPS.
Transcoders
I currently have configured two separate physical transcoders, each with multiple Nvidia GPUs. Further, on each transcoder I run separate instances of livepeer for each GPU installed. I found that this setup reduces overall transcoder downtime. Further, I have implemented custom scripts to monitor each instance of livepeer and automatically restart an instance if it crashes. (If anybody is interested in implementing a similar setup I am happy to help!)
Transcoder1
1x GTX1060 - 10 stream capacity
1x GTX1070 - 10 stream capacity
1x RTX2070 - 10 stream capacity
Transcoder2
2x GTX980ti - 10 stream capacity each
As noted above, I can currently support 50 concurrent streams. When I originally setup the transcoders I tried a high max session rate, but ran into stability issues. While my equipment and bandwidth is capable of supporting more, I have decided to be conservative and slowly increase capacity over time as stake / demand increases. At this point, stability / uptime are my highest priority.
Both transcoders are currently setup on the same network, located in Tampa Florida. However, I am currently pursuing opportunities to setup additional transcoders in other states on the east coast to achieve some level of geographic diversity. More to follow on this in the future.
I also have a couple GPU VPS instances that I can spin up when needed. Running them full time is too cost prohibitive, but in the event that I need to take any of the transcoders offline (for maintenance, etc.) I can use these VPS to maintain capacity.
Current set price per pixel is: 800 wei
Fees and rewards:
I am starting with a 10% reward cut and a 90% fee cut. I intend to maintain a higher fee cut initially so that I can invest the proceeds in expansion of ftkuhnsman capacity and cover the cost of operations. However, over time I will reduce the reward cut to share more profits with my delegators. Alternately, I intend to keep the reward cut low with the hope that my delegators will continue to stake their proceeds with ftkuhnsman. All that said, I am open and willing to consider all opinions/feedback of anyone who decides to stake with ftkuhnsman.
Currently due to low stake and high gas fees, rewards are not being called frequently. As stake increases, I will increase the frequency of reward calls.
Delegate your LPT tokens here:
https://explorer.livepeer.org/accounts/0x4a43b1d7e6227c8b0512e413f406555647ff7bdb/campaign
If you would like to reach out feel free to message me on Discord or post here in the forum.