Decentralizing Block Distribution
In light of Steemit being on the verge of bankruptcy many members of our community have stepped forward and pointed out that we need more full nodes. These nodes are a clear bottleneck. Many developers rely on them to acquire information from the blockchain. Even if Steemit doesn't go under we're still going to need better access to the blockchain.
What would happen if a million different apps were constantly pinging the Steemit server for data? Every server has its limit. Countless corporations have learned this the hard way.
However, unlike a private corporation, our blockchain is transparent. We aren't trying to hide any of this information from the world. In the long run, this little fact will give us a significant advantage in the future as we attempt to scale up.
Even though Justin Sun is a dumpster fire, I remain positive about Tron due to their acquisition of Bittorrent (and focus on gaming). This 140 million dollar buy is probably going to end up being well worth it. The peer to peer nature of torrenting is decentralized at its core. I believe the logistics used by Tron will be copied by many other blockchains in the future.
However, we shouldn't reactively wait around for other blockchains to show us the way. Where is our decentralized data distribution solution? Why haven't we created a torrent that lets anyone download and help distribute Steem blocks?
No matter how many full nodes we have, the concept of them remains a centralized one. Full nodes are an expense. If we want decentralization then we have to reward good behavior, not expect that people will do the right thing altruistically.
Power of Log(n)
We could set up a torrent for Steem blocks where each person in the network uploads two blocks for each block they download. This is an example of a problem with a complexity of log base 2. It is the opposite of exponential difficulty. A balanced binary tree with 30 levels has 2^30 nodes. That's a billion nodes. This means in the time it takes to upload 30 blocks sequentially a billion people could theoretically download that block with a torrent.
Each level doubles the number of nodes. 31 levels would double to over two billion.
Lack of incentive
This "solution" still leaves us with the same problem. We have to hope users seed the torrent out of the kindness of their hearts. Honestly I don't think this would be a problem. There are plenty of people on Steem willing to seed Steem blocks. However, Tron is currently in the process of solving this good Samaritan reliance issue.
By charging leeches a tiny amount and giving it to seeders, a real solution will be in effect soon™. This system promotes equilibrium. In general, coins will never exchange hands, but when it's worth the cost of leechers to buy bandwidth instead of uploading to others then a system is created where the seeders support the leeches for a competitive fee.
Conclusion
I'm not going to pretend that I know the in's and outs of how the Steem blockchain works, but clearly the way we are doing things now is not how we will be doing it in 5 years. In my opinion, peer-2-peer solutions are the decentralized future of blockchain success.
If someone figures out a way to get a torrent-type system to work, I'd certainly participate in seeding.
Thanks for tweeking my interest in TRON. Have been exploring it, off and on, since last night when first coming across your post.
Restructuring is not the verge of bankruptcy. The use of such a phrase can send out waves of FUD, intentionally or otherwise, in my opinion.
It is hard for me to understand how having huge amounts of incomplete parts of a blockchain is more secure than having full nodes containing full copies of said blockchain.
Should Steemit, Inc. deliver on its rocksDB implimented HF, then full nodes are expected to be able to run on 64GB or less home use machines. All it should take is a free noip.com domain to run one from home. Hell why not just run our own DNS's at that point for even greater security in this age of non-net neutrality?
It has been my feeling since my fourth post on the blockchain that it was time to leave the Steemit Nest.
The present developments (including the bear market to develop our middle class) is a good thing in my opinion and the present roadmap of development (as layed out in Ned's recent live streams) seems a sensible build on to what we have at present.
That's the opinion of this stakeholder, anyway. 😎
Torrents are just a more decentralized way that everyone could grab that 64 GB. The idea is to have a full copy if you want one. There are many apps I'd like to create that that would only require a tiny subset of the blockchain.
It would also be nice if we created some kind of checkpoint every year; take a snapshot of the blockchain at a secure point and then many people won't have to download the history before that moment. I believe this is already being talked about.
When ned says he's
after laying off 70% of the company things are not looking good.
Even so, it's not meant to be FUD. It's sink or swim time and I lean into swimming.
Yeah that would be cool. My assuption is that is how mobile wallets work on an even more micro level.
My head was so stuck in old school blockchains that the advantages that this would bring to dApps was overlooked by me. We must ensure to further incentivize full nodes, though, to avoid further centralization of them. 🖒
I heard something like "well this is not blockchain, this is p2p" many times in the last half year.
And people who said this always meant it in a negative way.
Aren't many stable coins p2p?
And arent there some big disadvantages with p2p?
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I'm not exactly sure what you are talking about, but you are wrong :D
Having the option of downloading Steem blocks on a torrent doesn't change our blockchain in the slightest.
Let's say you are talking about a coin like Tether. Yeah, that's not a blockchain. That's just a single company self-regulating a stable coin. They've been accused several times of printing Tether that isn't backed by USD and it is well within their power to do so.
The only stable-coin I know of that's actually a decentralized blockchain is Maker/Dai. All Dai is over-collateralized by Ethereum. This is enforced by smart-contracts and transparent on the blockchain.
All blockchains are p2p at their core. That is why they are so trustworthy. We sacrifice efficiency by copying the ledger's history to thousands of devices all over the world. I simply find it odd that so few blockchains use torrents to distribute this information.
Thanks for making that clear.
Someone told me that you have either a blockchain or p2p technology.. And that was probably what I didnt get.. ^^
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Very interesting blog and good ideas to help us out.
Thank you
Totally agree. I think that in a earlier future we will see something like huge servers divided in small computers which each one will receive part of the storage and working like AWS system. If that happen one day, we will see the dawn of centralized servers.
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I would love to rebuild my gaming pc (didn't game for 2 years) into a steem node, my ethernet connection is very good and the only barrier is law.
I really don't know how I should do it because there already are illegal things on the steem chain. And you don't want to have thiosein your home pc in germany.. ^^
Yeah. Let's see what the law in the surrounding countries says..