It seems that the entire infrastructure of Forging is going to primarily benefit whales. I went through the process of buying a VPS on vultr, setting up a server, securing it, and establishing a node. It wasn't hard, but getting the information was tricky. "KyleFromOhio" makes some great videos though and compiles links - so they are good to check out. Link

BUT - I wanted to see if Forging was anything similar to the cost effectiveness of mining. As in - could it cover some of the cost a $40/month VPS for at least another year while the coin supply diminishes.

The answer is no unless you have serious capital to hold in Lisk. You need to probably hold at least 1000 LSK in order to see serious gains. For somebody who made it big on ETH, that's a piece of cake. For somebody trying to build a portfolio from about $5k seed, it's a risky move.

LSK did just hit a dollar, and FOMO is a serious concern - but my point here isn't to argue against the value of LSK, it's to just make the statement that in order to see even 1.0 LSK in a single year from Forging, you will need to be holding a minimum of probably 250 LSK, which right now is $250.

If LSK increases in value, say a 10x increase to hit $1B cap, you'll be able to cover server costs of $40/m - but that won't be coming for Forging. I think that the real value in setting up Forging is to become acquainted with how the system works, and maybe at some stage I'll use what little I know about NodeJS to build some test apps.

Again, this isn't a knock against LSK, just a word of caution to anybody who wants to try out Forging. Maybe I'm just in the wrong pools, or voting for delegates wrong, but based on the numbers I found from http://thepool.io - you will only earn about 0.00001324 new-LSK/day/existing-LSK in your account. So for that to mean anything, you need to move that decimal point 5 spaces to the right. It's a whale's game now.