An excellent post, @heiditravels, and really informative. You've actually inspired me to join Steemit and write my first post, just to add a little more information about Crown, since they have SystemNodes as well as MasterNodes, which are a much more affordable 'entry-level' node, as well as being the basis for some of the really exciting features that they're working on (I'm not part of the Crown team, but I am an active part of the community). I'd love it if you could have a look at my post too and let me know what you think. I'm guessing it's bad form to link directly to it, but hopefully you can find it easily enough from my profile!