Witness Update Jan 16, 2018 - Bigger, Better and Bolder

bsameep (53)in #witness • 7 years ago (edited)

My Steemit family,

I feel really proud to announce that I have upgraded my witness server from 24GB to now 32 GB. It is now much Bigger, Better and Bolder

Bigger

Due to RPC node issue, my witness stopped temporarily and I used that as an opportunity to upgrade to a bigger server - 32 GB. The re-sync took some time to occur and in the meantime I missed 3 blocks. Sorry.

Why bigger server? - The Steem community is exploding in its population, and therefore the number of transactions per block has almost doubled from where it was just 3 months ago when I first became a witness.

Together because of this population explosion and increased in number of transactions, the size of blockchain is now increasing on a exponential scale. It crossed 20 GB in early January.

This demanded Witnesses to move to a bigger Server that can Host this massive and ever running Blockchain.

Better

Connecting to the above theme, with exploding population size on Steemit, It seemed that the current block size may not be able to handle the load of all the new users. The new users will not be able to conduct multiple transactions due to limited bandwidth and limited transactions that a block can store. Therefore some of the witnesses decided to increase (basically double) the Block size so as to accumulate more transactions)

I am happy to state that, i am among the first few who took that initiative and increased the block size.

Bolder

Reduced account creation fees - as and when a new account is created

The account creation fees was 0.2 Steem. When Steem price was $1, this did not cause any concern as fees for creating new account was

0.2 * 30 (recommended fee) = 6 STEEM

Thus a new account was created with delegation of 6 Steem or $6; enough to do general posting/ commenting and upvoting activity.

But with Steem price at $6 - this would mean cost for creating a new account would top $36 ($60 if the price of Steem is $10).

After through discussion and tests conducted by @drakos @timcliff and @smooth it was concluded that Account creation fees of 0.1 would be enough for a new account to conduct basic operations.

Hence as a corrective measure I also changed the account creation fees in my server

Drop in witness ranking

It is sad to state that, despite being pro-active in staying on top of things and taking corrective measures to keep the Blockchain Steem running my witness rank dropped from 88 to 107

The witness rank dropped cus one of my witness supporter @jerrybanfield who contributed ~90 percent of the Vesting Shares decided to take down his vote.

As a result, I am signing much less blocks now, and the witness reward is not sufficient to cover the server cost.