Reflections on Things Offline
As most regular steemit patrons know, the steemit blockchain was offline for many hours overnight. I'm not going to talk about the technical aspects of the downtime or the quick patch and resolution that brought the blockchain and website we love to hate back online.
As a web developer (a technical person of sorts) I've always nurtured a mild fear of things being outside my control. Since I have to watch and maintain a bunch of web servers, as well as the web sites sitting on those servers, I fear the day when I can't connect to one of my servers to do something critical. These servers aren't sitting in arm's reach next to me where I can just push a reset button or swap out a bad stick of RAM; they may be in St Louis or Washington or Phoenix.
If they go down, I go down. If they go down and I can't do anything about it, I'm at the mercy of others. I have to contact the network facility where my servers are located and hope their tech support folks can find a solution. Or wait for them to pass the buck and blame something out of their control, like some poorly-paid temp construction guy who cut a fiber optic line up the street from them. And then I wait, nervous, fielding calls from my clients who ask what the problem is and what the ETA for a resolution is.
In the case of a blockchain outage, who do you go to in order to file a complaint? If the blockchain goes offline and you have your business built upon it, and your data there, and your contracts there, and your digital assets there, and suddenly it goes away, there aren't any doors you can pound on or phone numbers you can call to give some harried secretary a piece of your mind.
Granted, these blockchains don't exist in a vacuum, and there will be some level of community support and developer interaction that presumably seeks a resolution. But they don't know you. They don't owe you anything.
You're just another funky address on someone else's blockchain.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://negativerealm.com/reflections-on-things-offline/
i can understand the difficulties you describe but as a user...what can you do to protect yourself against something like that except praying!! ..or what can you do in order to be ready to face it
Mostly I think you just have to hope that whoever is in charge of fixing it is making enough money off you to be just as panicked as you are lol
This is probably the truth of it. If there's money to be made, someone will be along shortly to fix the issue. If not...you're on your own.
I thought about it yesterday, how we've actually become really spoilt as the internet users without even noticing it. Le wild 504 appears and we go - gasp - How dare they, what are these, middle ages?
You're right. Our expectations rise even as things become more complicated, and we become less tolerant of errors or problems.
Yep. One of the many issues I'm seeing with decentralisation since I joined Steemit @negativer.
It's not all fun and roundabouts! 😂
Indeed. Sometimes it seems you're just trading one set of problems for another.
I agree @negativer. And I think that is the case with decentralisation because, in the end, it's created by humans and, until we change, each system will just find a way to reflect the current stage of human development.
And what if the one in charge stops estimating the value of money the way he always did.
whoa..didnt ever thought like that before..
Had no clue!