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As a freelancer, business man or whatever the term could fit one of the biggest dilemmas I have had is the pricing. You can not give your time, knowledge and effort for free, but while competing against others, I have found that many customers take the pricing as the first factor. So, here is a way I have found to make this very attractive without hurting my working effort. I hope this will help others as well.
The first thing is that this technique only applies when selling products with a scale scheme. For example, giving a course and billing per participant, building a server cluster and billing per-server setup, and software licensing, could even apply for support hours if you know how to deal with that, but I wouldn't recommend that.

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This is far from a project, but a way I think we can help each other.
With this pandemic, everybody is trying to survive, and I have seen mainly these two behaviours:
- some businesses that believe they are indispensable, start raising their prices. Some of them even charge a COVID fee for a reason I can't understand.
- other businesses that understand people may stop using them, and find a different way to reward people for using them. Some give free goodies, others give credit with a low interest rate, and others which I believe is my favourite rewarding their current customers because of referrals.
Read more: Another Way to Help Each Other During these hard Times

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SIA Coin is a cryptocurrency that allows you to earn some earnings by renting your spare hard disk space. To be able to rent your space, you must configure some parameters (some of them technical, some others economical). These parameters help the SIA environment to assign a score; the way the score is assigned is complex. I have spent some code reading and I have found the following:
- Select the node that is in the n = total_active_hosts * 3 / 5 place. Instead of using the median that uses the element in the middle (1 / 2), SIA uses the 3 / 5.
- a correction factor is calculated using the estimated score of the host selected from the first step. c = 1 / estimated_score. The estimated score is given by the SIA API.
- All other active hosts' estimated score is multiplied by the correction factor to get a score.
Please note that I am not a Golang coder. I may have some misreadings. What is not clear to me is how the estimated score is calculated (es(X) = n). SIA Coin documentation says it is a combination of prices, uptime, free space, and other things. But they haven't documented (yet) exactly the math behind that number. Again, I am not a Golang coder.
When a renter looks for space, the renter will select those hosts with the highest score. So the big question is, what parameters can I adjust to have a higher score and start making some profits?
Well, thank god the genetic algorithms exist.
Read more: Using Genetic Algorithms to Optimize SIA Coin Host Parameters