Sustaining Steem #1 // Datacenter Tendering Marketplace for Steem Witness blockchain hosting provision (and other chains!)
so this is meant to be a bit of an ear worm thought process for opening a dialog with existing witness hosts and the whole notion of hosting a copy of the steem blockchain — because we need a copy of the chain running in a dependable way for any of the other stuff above it to function — no chain, no dapps, no communities, no delegation, no payouts, back to shitty centralised systems and moaning back on twitter about the world.
ugh.
a marketplace for marrying datacenter provision with the ever changing demands of a witness host
So these are mainly bullet points because I don’t want to write long sentences out because quite simply I’ll cannot be bothered, I’ve got other things to do today but I do want to share this and get some thought processes out.
- data centres need customers, it’s a buyers market right now so plenty of potentials deals on the table
- we could wrap the hosting deals into a smart contract of sorts
- the data centres would use software we write to automate the process of mirroring our existing environment on their hosting
- it’s a marketplace so the hosts compete to tender for your business
- we should make sure it’s global distributed
- we build tools so that data centres, hosts, cloud providers can list their services and we can fit for deals with them in return for exposure on the many dapps
- lots of these bare metal server companies have invested millions in hardware that’s sitting around, just having a ‘customer’ on their financials is good enough to show customer intention for the banks propping most of them up
- most data centres have bought electricity, server room floor space and connectivity, they simply ‘divvy that up to the clients on a per monthly cost
witnesses who have a revenue stream are probably ok
. .. and I get that, the ones at the top of the table already have something else going on, they have probably delegated, invested, paid yearly or covered bills when they had more than they needed and have put in place income streams to cover them when situations like now (extended bear grills) situations happen - that’s smart, but just having 10 awesome witnesses hosts do not make a global decentralised network strength.
some kind of cylindrical fund distribution quota for witnesses that have have served over a period of time.
When I had an apartment and I lived on the top floor of NINE flats we all paid into the roof, if the roof came off it effected everyone, the fund which was part of our ground rent was to cover the building, we had a small group of people that held minutes in a simple manner, I’m sure already the top 10/20 witnesses already have this round table situation in place.
I realise it get’s all a bit difficult and awkward when we talk about distribution of money and supporting other witnesses and what about someone at position 11 and position 21 etc, how do they break in to those ranks, even thou based over time etc — I don’t know, your smart, work it out.
a hub for providing blockchain hosting
Why can’t we use our blockchain in this manner, build a website, charge for ads on it, have it like a coinmarketcap but for hosting, put the big guys on their, digitalocean, amazon, write code for rolling out a copy of the blockchain for people wanting to get their feet wet, do outreach to other respected hosting companies — get into some of the big pipes, visualise showing the steem block network on a big spinning 3d fucking globe and the interconnect speeds, make it sexy, let’s be the conduit to connect the data providing data centres with all the witness needs and get a fair price, maybe we have short orders for when certain crypto currency get’s a certain point.
. .. and maybe we just stick parts of the chain in cold storage
Let’s find a way to put things into Cloud Data Archiving | Long-term Object Storage | Amazon Glacier storage, maybe we can find a way to take our least popular content that’s not been viewed and push that out, if people want to see it then it’s recalled but based on someones RC/manage — I can get this but it’s gonna cost X amount and I’ll deliver you it as an email tomorrow etc (spitballing here) — anything to offset it
how are big progressive home-brew server companies like backblaze doing right now?
B2 Cloud Storage: The Lowest Cost On Demand Storage As a Service — maybe we can use these guys, they are fast, build their own hardware, maybe they can become a sponsor, maybe we can gush about their providing, speed, latency, storage — maybe we need an INTERNET ARCHIVE style approach to the way we view the steem blockchain, maybe we need to consider putting together a 501c charity just for the ongoing provisioning of the chain?
Maybe we need to drill down on older experiments that woke up quickly to the storage demands that platforms would need — NPR Choice page you know like when the Library of Congress was gonna archive EVERY SINGLE TWEET and then decided to be selective about it, maybe just maybe we need to start considering our storage and bandwidth options on a macro level.
Just some thoughts, have at it! :)
__humble
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