RE: New Accounts Don't Have Enough SP to Fully Interact with the Blockchain. Should witnesses update the Max Block Size? (Discussion)
I would think bigger blocks introduce more issues for witnesses, and might push for higher account fee.
STEEM is already at a 30GB blockchain, and it's only been around for a year.
root@someguy123 steem-docker # du -sh data/witness_node_data_dir/blockchain
28G data/witness_node_data_dir/blockchain
I run my witness on a HDD, and advise others to, because at the rate STEEM is growing, Witnesses may need a RAID of SSDs to hold the chain within a few years. Making the blocks bigger would accelerate us towards that fate.
It's understandable that new accounts can't interact very often. This could be thought of as a positive not a negative, simply because it reduces the amount of spam on the chain, as well as armies of upvote/flag bots.
I find it's rare for most people's introduceyourself to do poorly. This usually means within their first few posts, they may gain a decent amount of SP to interact (though we now have 7 day payouts which are annoying).
On the other hand, we don't want to become like Bitcoin, where people flock to other platforms because we're all too stubborn to just increase the block size.
So one thing to consider is that as far as I know, the "max block size" is not really limiting the size of blocks (currently). I believe the blocks that are being produced are significantly below that max. The parameter though is also part of the bandwidth usage calculation, which is where it is having an effect. It also mainly affects new accounts, because once you have more than ~10 SP you can interact within normal/reasonable limits.
Thank you for that information. I had no idea.
maybe we can have a longer vote, comment and post timer for new people instead of being locked out for days at a time? I this this is discouraging.
Thanks for your input @someguy123!
Yeah, I've been thinking about the size of the blockchain for a while now. I'm happy to see how quickly disk technology is getting cheaper, but it's still something we should keep in mind. Maybe the Steemit account can just delegate more Steem per account in the beginning.
I think there's such a huge influx of new users that they're trying to cut down where they can. for example, I recently got my mom to sign up and she was delegated around 150SP.
However, yesterday it was reduced down to like 4SP which quickly hit the bandwidth limits. @timcliff got them to set it back to 9, so I guess we'll see if that's enough to solve it (well, for now at least).
Wow, that's a pretty major change. Seems to me Steemit inc messed that up and should fix it, not the witnesses. 150 to 4 is drastic.
The account creation fee is currently .2 STEEM (set by the witnesses). A week or so ago, it was .5 STEEM. When it was .5 STEEM, it cost
.5 * 29.5 * 5 = 73.5delegated SP to create an account. That was way more than what is needed for bandwidth limitations. A calculation was done based on the bandwidth limits at the time, and it was determined that an account with 5 SP could 'reasonably' interact with the blockchain. Based on that, they removed the unnecessary delegation and left users with 5 SP.Since then though, the bandwidth requirements seem to have gone up. I assume because of the increase in usage. 5 SP no longer seems enough to interact with the blockchain. It seems like 10-12 SP is the new limit.
There is a workable solution on the Steemit side of things, which is Steemit can delegate 10-12 SP instead of 5. I don't think this would be a huge deal.
The real problem though is that Steemit is not the only service creating accounts. Lots of accounts get created with non-delegated SP, and those users only start out with
.2 * 30 = 6 SP. Anyone who has an account setup that way won't have enough SP to 'reasonably' interact with the blockchain.Isn't this the responsibility of each individual system though? They could also delegate Steem Power if they wanted to.
My hunch is most of the growth happening right now is via steemit.com and if they can fix that easily by delegating Steem Power again, it seems to me they should do this right away. To me, a drastic change like that which negatively impacted the users seems like a mistake which should be corrected.
I talked to Steemit, and they are going to change it from 5 to 10-15, so it should be OK for Steemit created accounts going forward. They are also going to see what can be done about the accounts that were updated to 5 and see if they can be increased to 10-15.
That's great news, Tim!
Curious who you talk to at Steemit and how. Do they have a main phone line you call or something? Hehehe. Thanks for making this issue a priority.
bat-signal ;)
The systems are designed to allow users to create new accounts based on whatever the blockchain account creation fee is. If the account creation fee is not high enough to support 'normal' activity, then that is going to cause a problem.
If we are going down that path, then the solution to make it 'work' (without depending on a bunch of third party developers to know that they need to add extra / special logic) would be to force the right amount by raising the account creation fee.
I agree 100% that it is a problem that needs to be corrected. The main question though is what is the right approach to correct it :)
Personally, I am leaning towards increasing the max block size, but I am also treading down that path very carefully because I do not fully understand the implications.
If I understand the problem well enough, one possible solution, if it could be implemented without too much difficulty in a future fork, is to have a fractional reserve "pool" approach (which may be similar to what you're saying with a multiplier). Since not all users of a particular registrar (ie. steemit) will be online at the same time, users who have less than say 20SP can be extended up to 20SP towards bandwidth by "tapping into" the registrar's own SP reserve up to the designated limit set by each registrar.
Interesting idea. That puts the responsibility on each registrar to ensure that pool isn't being abused by users they on-boarded to the blockchain. I could see some sane limits being needed to prevent abuse, but it does seem like an interesting approach.
It's also possible we're just seeing these issue now because of a big spike in the price of Steem combined with a lot of new users. If one or both of those were more stable, we might not have as much problems planning things out.
I see what you mean, and I agree that keeps the solution simple for third-party developers. Maybe a good approach is recognizing a delegated Steem Power model is better for creating new accounts and under that model it's safer to introduce a multiplier to ensure the there's always plenty to go around (as it was before steemit made the change). If all onboarding systems took a similar approach, there would be less of a concern and it might end up being cheaper in the long run for those systems as they could just reclaim their SP for abandoned accounts.
If that makes the most sense to fix things quickly, I'd be ready to do it now (though I'm just a backup witness).
I also don't know the implications of changing the blocksize, but I do think it's something we should discuss with the experts before taking positions on.
Yep, totally agree.
The @steemit account is the ideal faucet to seed accounts with adequate SP to interact with the blockchain.
just curious, how much RAM and CPU power do you currently need to maintain your witness these days?
CPU power doesn't really matter.
As for RAM, minimum 8GB. Disk 30gb.