RE: Hard Fork 20 Has Been Reversed Due To Bugs - Back to Hard Fork 19!
I am a witness and am in communication with the many other witnesses who combine to run the nodes that keep the blockchain alive. We literally see the traffic moving through our servers as our servers produce the blocks that create the blockchain. If you will not accept my word for it, I suggest you ask the people who are informing you here to provide an analysis of the publicly available code that is used to run the Steem blockchain - the same that has been peer reviewed by countless people and specialists.
Steemit.com is hosted on a webserver, like other websites, yes. The database that Steemit.com uses in its operation is NOT hosted on a website like other company's websites. The database that Steemit.com uses IS the steem blockchain, which is distributed across many publicly operated nodes.
There IS a way that the entire blockchain could go down and the steemit website could stay up - which is that the two are independent. This is why Steemit.com never became unreachable, it was simply unable to access the database and so couldn't display posts and perform operations on the blockchain.
I was constantly testing the Steemit website for about 9 hours and it was down the entire time. If the Steemit site were up but the data not loading, what you explain would make sense, somewhat. But a true block-chain would never go down, since the data is never hosted in one single location. This is obviously not the case. Leader Tech informs us thus that block-chain is a hoax.
When a website truly 'goes offline', you will see either a white page, a notification from your ISP that the page cannot be reached or possibly an error code from the webserver that the site is hosted on. In the case of Steemit.com, at least for me, I saw the Steemit.com error page that was being served by the Steemit webserver due to it not being able to load fresh data from the blockchain. On some page loads, Steemit.com actually loaded, but the data was old/frozen and when I tried to load new data from the blockchain it could not be loaded.
Blockchains can go offline if there is a loss of consensus due to forks and other errors - this is to protect the integrity of the data/chain. In this case the blockchain stopped to allow a solution to be put in place. While data is replicated on blockchains, so that many nodes hold copies of the data, that does not mean that they will all just keep producing blocks in the event of a fault. If they all kept creating new blocks while not agreeing with each other that the blocks were valid, the result would be many, many simultaneous chains that would be effectively competing to be the 'real' blockchain. This is obviously not viable when there is a need for the data to be consistent across numerous nodes. What you are missing is that the servers are all running code that comes from a centralised source (in this case it is hosted on github.com and worked on by a variety of people). If all or most nodes/servers adopt the same code, then yes, they can all or mostly all fail and can fail sufficiently that the chain freezes until a fix is put in place.
The idea that the blockchain is a hoax is easily disproved by simply launching your own witness server and observing the data processes.
Ok, so if the Steemit site goes down or the data on the github becomes corrupted, anyone could take-down Steemit. Just hack two web-sites or hack the code on github and poof the entire block-chain goes down. How is that distributed block-chain truly and not centralized?
Steemit promises a faster transactions per second then other block-chain but uses Amazon servers to host data. Amazon is controlled by The Clowns. How is that guaranteeing any kind of true privacy to a block-chain that depends on a githut code to be stable and operational and depends on a clown server to host the data of the main server operational functions?
Steemit.com's code (called 'condenser') is open source and is already being run by many people on their own versions of Steemit (some are highly edited and don't look like steemit). If the version on Github gets corrupted, there are other versions that are independent of that version and older versions exist anyway that can be used prior to the date of the corruption. Changes cannot be made to Steemit without the coders of steemit agreeing to them. In any case though, Steem and Steemit are NOT the same thing. If Steemit.com completely crashed and burned and could not be recovered, the Steem blockchain would carry on because it is a separate project.
There are many people viewing the code on github and in all the years of me working on github code, I cannot recall a single example of repositories being hacked in a way that came to light and caused problems. Whether code is centralised or decentralised it can still be hacked - I think perhaps you have some gaps in understanding regarding how the software creation and distribution process takes place.
No, it is Steem that promises fast transactions - Steemit isn't a blockchain, it is a website that uses a blockchain.
Steem is not Steemit. Steemit is not Steem.
The data used by Steemit, including the content of yours and my posts here are stored in Steem and not in Steemit. These posts are not stored on Amazon by Steemit inc. - these posts are stored on over 100 different servers operated by members of the public (including me) - some of whom may use Amazon and some of whom may not (I don't). The system is designed so that if one node operates out of sync with the others, then the others will know.
The data on the Steem blockchain is mostly public, with the exception of encrypted memo fields and passwords. The idea is that by having code open source (available on github) it is transparent and able to be examined by others who can look in it for errors, holes and nefarious intentions. If the code is closed source, you have something like Facebook which is rife with exploitations and only a presentation of privacy with no real privacy. On balance, having a project like this open source is infinitely better for privacy and end users.
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There is a master profile on a SINGLE set of servers managing all these “distributed databases” that you contend are backups. No! There is no other way to maintain it other than a centralized numbering system run by unscrupulous humans. It is essentially a social networking profile gathering transaction data only and named Bitcoin instead of Facebook Credits, Microsoft Money, etc. Remember, John McAfee and all cryto proponents are alphabet agents, no matter what they say. Once a liar, always a liar.
https://aim4truth.org/2018/09/19/truth-news-headlines-september-19-2018/
So if nothing of what I said took place, how did Steemit go down for 9 hours then? The entire site was down. I added a comment to a new post I just made also. Thanks.
I have already explained most of the surface details as to why Steemit went down. Steemit gets its data from Steem (the blockchain) and Steem (the blockchain) was down because the many servers that keep it running were upgraded to code that had bugs in it. You can review the discussion threads and bug fixes for the exact software involved in github here:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/compare/v0.20.0...master
Ok. So if the code had a bug, why did you not revert immediately to the previous code instead of leaving the main server down for 9 hours? You said github cannot be hacked yet you yourselves placed a bug into the code and it took you 9 hours to remove the bug?
? You have made many judgements here that are not the truth and for which no evidence exists.
i. you yourselves placed a bug into the code and it took you 9 hours to remove the bug?
No, I did not place a bug anywhere - I have never made more than the most basic change to the code for Steem on Github (months ago). The bug was not 'placed' in there deliberately. Bugs are, by their nature, mistakes or oversights in the complex code that runs a system. Sometimes it is not a simple matter to locate the error and fix it. Sometimes millions of lines of code are involved. Imagine a maths equation that spans millions of lines - how will you find the error when it doesn't give you the desired result? 9 hours is not such a bad turn around given the situation.
ii. You said github cannot be hacked yet
I never stated that github cannot be hacked, but it is true that the many people involved with the code would be quite likely to detect that the hack had taken place since they often have copies of the code at home and would see that the code had been tampered with. 'Hacking a site maliciously' and 'code having an error in it' are not the same thing at all.
iii. why did you not revert immediately to the previous code instead of leaving the main server down for 9 hours
Some witnesses did revert to the earlier code and some hadn't yet upgraded to the new code. However, even some of those who had not upgraded to the new code found that they were unable to process blocks and eventually the entire chain was locked due to errors. The blockchain had to be reactivated once the bugs were fixed and it took several hours to locate and fix the bugs.