RE: Steem Blockchain Patch Issued
I'm happy that everything worked out and that nothing harmful took place to the blockchain or to the accounts. I'm also happy that things are up and running now.
Thank you for all the work troubleshooting and getting us back up and running.
What I'm not happy about is the lost of productivity for five hours, and potentially up to 12 for others depending on their time zones.
To know that one failed transaction could bring the entire blockchain to a halt, rather than it being isolated and dealt with individually does not make me happy. I know I'm not a large account, so what I potentially lost in rewards and productivity individually during those five hours is probably minimal. But what about the combination of everyone? I don't know what that amounts to, but I'm going to be conservative and say it's substantial.
I know this will be looked upon as a complaint, and it is, but I'm hoping that someone somewhere can see that it's constructive. It isn't optimum, or for that matter, an adequate solution for everything to stop anytime something untoward occurs on the blockchain. I've checked into nijeah's account, and he's currently delegating most of his SP to a deadfish account who hasn't done anything with it for at least two months.
I'm not trying to be disagreeable here. I'm trying to point out that one account doing something that occurs regularly (powering down) shouldn't stop the entire blockchain. If this one is fixed, are there other potential bugs like this one still lurking out there somewhere? Is having the entire blockchain stop the only way we have to troubleshoot it?
The transaction that caused it to stop was a very unusual one. At best, it was a mistake. There was a good chance it was actually malicious.
The majority of the time, individual bad transactions are filtered out before they enter blocks. This way, they do not impact all the good ones. In this case, it got past the initial filter. Once it was in a block, it is not possible to separate it out.
I know it is not ideal, and obviously the loss of t up-time was a really big deal, but given what happened, the temporary freeze was the best possible outcome.
I appreciate the answers. Does anyone know why this very unusual transaction got past the initial filter? And is there only one filter to go through?
Every type of transaction has filters coded up to prevent invalid transactions of that type. This person found a "creative" case that was not anticipated, and therefore didn't have coding in place to stop.
that it happpened ( the freeze) and was fixed within 3-4 hours speaks volumes. well, to me at least