STEEM Witness Forum Jan 20th 2018 - Can The STEEM Blockchain Scale - Where are we going?
Where is STEEM going and can we scale?
I listened to the Witness forum today and the most important part to me for this experience today was the brief discussion about the STEEM Blockchain Scalability. My interest in Scalability is primarily due to the fact that I own and run a small ColdFusion website hosting company.
I am increasingly becoming more involved in blockchain technology and looking at converting my data center into a STEEM blockchain data center while also hosting other masternodes for other crypto currencies. I have one witness node now running and look to bring up my SEED node by the end of next week and then I hope to add a 512GB STEEM RPC node before the end of Q1 2018.
What I took from the Witness forum on the Scalability issue
Outside of the hardfork 20 that is own its way down the pike....
Currently the STEEM RPC nodes are consuming about 1 GB of additional ram every day
STEEM RPC nodes are already at 256 GB. The cost of keeping up with the infrasturcture is going to eventually trickle down to the lower witnesses.
@someguy123 runs Privex Hosting, and anonsteem, he stated he is working on growing infrastructure now with the addition of 512 GB RPC nodes.
The introduction of SMT's is going to lead to a lot of new growth on STEEM. @aggroed himself intends to create at least two SMT's of his own.
@aggroed stated Steemit Alexa ranking as of today is globally 1,129 and by the end of 2018 we should be in the Alexa top 300 at least for the US Markets and we should have 100,000 "daily active" users by the end of 2018.
In 4 years the STEEM RPC nodes will require 2 terabyte of RAM. That is at the current growth rate. If the STEEMit.com social media network is going to make massive waves in the world of social media the we are looking at atleast doubling the growth rate. In doing so the growth will require servers with more than two terabytes for STEEM RPC nodes in less than two years. Finding 2 terabyte servers that are even remotely affordable is not at this point an easy task. Perhaps in a year this may change. But right now this is going to be a major roadblock for expansive growth.
Optimization is going to be the key to massive growth
@good-karma stated optimization is going to have to be the route to take.
In order for us to get more bang for our buck as witnesses STEEMit inc. is going to have to focus on optimizing the codebase for If we are to maintain a primary witness ceiling of 20 witnesses without going to 30 or 40 then we are going to have to address this sooner than later.
Currently the STEEM Blockchain is not very well optimized so a lot can be done to improve this optimization before we reach the the massively expensive 2 Terabyte ceiling.
Outside of Scalability
Last thing I took note of was from @lukestokes that STEEM is not STEEMit. I think a lot of people do not actually understand this. He suggest that users learn the diffrence between the Steemit and the blockchain. That is outstanding advice for the minnows. KNOW YOUR POND!
Listen to the Witness Forum on D.tube
@aggroed hosts a panel discussion among Top 20 Witnesses: @roelandp, @good-karma, @someguy123, @anyx, @lukestokes.
Be sure to vote for these witnesses if you have not already done so. They are lynch pins in our STEEM world.
Just my two STEEMS Worth.
Vote LibertyRanger as your Witness or Set Proxy.
Go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses URL address then scroll down to Vote.
Please follow me @LibertyRanger, Vote Up and Resteem
Thank you,
@LibertyRanger
This is a great recap and important information for all of us. As a relatively new minnow, I'm trying to learn as much as possible, so thank you. I just learned about the Witness program this week.
Thanks for the recap for those of us not in the convo and for growing Steem (and Steemit).
Hoodish!!!!!!!!!!!!! lurking around the same places!
Hahaha, you know it. We got dreams and goals, right?
Its cool when someone leaves u a good comment on a post, then u see they have a great post up of something you were already interested in, and then you see a fellow poker player increasing his steem knowledge, happened at least twice now
Yeah for sure. Always an honor to play against you and learn alongside you here
My recap is only covered inside the final 15 min of a 2 hour forum. It had much much more vital info in it that could serve for all steemians to hear. Both old, new, Technical and the regular guy that just wants a place to post his blog. Understanding the actual behind the scenes and the enormity of the work and time involved gives STEEMit.com a whole other layer of appreciation.
I am glad you found my post interesting though. I may go back and cherry pick some other topics to post about as it all concerns me. However since OI own a data center the actual hardware infrastructure is more ofan atual lure for me and how I can help STEEM and STEEMit grow. It is a very exciting place to be.
Where would be a good place to go to get more information about what was discussed in the forum? If this was only 15 minutes, then I have a lot more to read and learn about lol.
Yes, it is. I'm less than a month in and I'm hooked and dedicated to helping it grow. We grow as STEEM grows.
I linked to it twice in the article
Will do, thank you.
Glad to have found this post. I personally think the active # of users estimate here will get crushed by the end of 2018, but just a hunch ;). I have been thinking about and wanting to learn about the scale ability of this platform so hope to see more like this in the future I can add to my mental soup. Thanks!
I would actually LOVE to to see the active users closer to 1 million by the end of 2018. I think 100k is way too conservative. Consider this fact, less than 1% of the Us Population has ever even heard of Bitcoin. I don't think that number is to the moon either considering how fast crypto took of this year and the crackdown on free speech on twitter and facebook is only going to be a reason for more people to look elsewhere for a community to become part of.
I would think the 1% bitcoin stat was from a year ago. Most people I talk to now have heard of it, they just know nothing about it.
I agree 1mill could be crushed & that people will leave those dirty sites. I think developing countries can give steemit a huge push past 1mill. Looking at the smartphone penetration rates from 2017 there are only 27 countries in the world with a 50% adoption rate. There will soon be hundreds of millions if not billions of new smartphone users from poor areas eager to use their phone as a tool to make money. If steemit is positioned as a place for people to easily generate income watch out
Nice!
Thank you for summing up this point, that's interesting, the way the site is evolving in its Alexa rating. Good for Steemit Inc and for everyone who owns steem.
Gives me hope that my own SP will be valuable one day.
Is it possible to remove old data from the blockchain ??
Introduction of SMT's will add more burden on the blockchain.
Once it is in the blockchain it lives for ever.
This post has received a 2.15 % upvote from @boomerang thanks to: @libertyranger