RAMUSDT
RAM / Tether USD
crypto

I have 128 GB RAM, 192 GB RAM, and 256 GB workstations. Not DDR5 though...

Was about to say this. RAM costs basically doubled these past few months.

Yea but the actual action of trading the gold for goods and services only uses energy with your arm muscles. Crypto currency is sucking up energy via mining AND transactions. It’s also causing GPU and RAM prices to skyrocket. Look at RAM currently… that has to be factored in as well.

Correct, I'm running it on a mini-PC, first an ASUS PN50, now an ECS Liva Z5. Both are $200 machines that you just add RAM and an NVME SSD to and are ready to go. But in that sense it is no different than staking on Linux, you need a PC running 24/7.
And you're right, Windows fuckery is the main obstacle but in the end it boils down to:
* Completely disable automatic updates through Group Policy (then you can do maintenance and updates on your schedule, like say every 6 months)
* Disable MS Store automatic app updates (this one fucked me over a couple of times by auto-updating the terminal app and just leaving the validator processes working in a sort of limbo)
* Install a NTP client for keeping time synced
* Add exclusions to Defender so it ignores the staking directories
And that's it, after that, I'd argue that validating on Windows is way easier than Linux, you just need 2 binaries, and upgrading is just downloading and replacing a binary, stopping and re-running the command. No need to mess with package management, docker management, file permissions, user permissions, or firewall rules. Well, at least it's worked amazingly well for me over the last 4 years.

I have 128 GB RAM, 192 GB RAM, and 256 GB workstations. Not DDR5 though...

Was about to say this. RAM costs basically doubled these past few months.

Yea but the actual action of trading the gold for goods and services only uses energy with your arm muscles. Crypto currency is sucking up energy via mining AND transactions. It’s also causing GPU and RAM prices to skyrocket. Look at RAM currently… that has to be factored in as well.

Correct, I'm running it on a mini-PC, first an ASUS PN50, now an ECS Liva Z5. Both are $200 machines that you just add RAM and an NVME SSD to and are ready to go. But in that sense it is no different than staking on Linux, you need a PC running 24/7.
And you're right, Windows fuckery is the main obstacle but in the end it boils down to:
* Completely disable automatic updates through Group Policy (then you can do maintenance and updates on your schedule, like say every 6 months)
* Disable MS Store automatic app updates (this one fucked me over a couple of times by auto-updating the terminal app and just leaving the validator processes working in a sort of limbo)
* Install a NTP client for keeping time synced
* Add exclusions to Defender so it ignores the staking directories
And that's it, after that, I'd argue that validating on Windows is way easier than Linux, you just need 2 binaries, and upgrading is just downloading and replacing a binary, stopping and re-running the command. No need to mess with package management, docker management, file permissions, user permissions, or firewall rules. Well, at least it's worked amazingly well for me over the last 4 years.