RE: "Steem Is Broken!?!" A Conversation with Sida of Partiko
I hear what you are saying about people having centralised expectations of a decentralised network...
But...
If the steem blockchain is two years old (having started in 2016), and it takes a day for the nodes to replay it from the beginning, that is a problem.
What happens when the blockchain is ten years old? Will it take five days to replay the nodes? And when the blockchain is twenty years old - will it take ten days to replay the nodes?
And that is with everything going fine. When things go wrong and you have to put in a fix and replay all over again, then even when people are patient and have "decentralised expectations", you have a serious problem.
Nobody is going to wait that long. Which means that either you guys need to stop doing fixes and hardforks, or you change this replay-from-the-start business as it doesn't scale.
Most replays are never noticed. Most bugs don't require immediate replays by all nodes for the system to remain functional. The frozen chain issue we had recently and this issue with the hard fork were extreme examples. Mostly replays are done on backups and then brought in seamlessly (which is why most people don't notice them).
I do hear you, though. Speeding up replays will help minimize downtime in situations like this. It's certainly being talked about and improvements in both the hardware possibilities available and in the software may help make this a reality.