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Without smart contract technology, building truely decentralized applications is difficult (though not impossible).

Curious, do you run your own front end to the Steem chain locally? If so, what do you use?

We run our own front ends. We ran into many problems following the herd per say , from centralized front end development. (i've gotten more people to deploy front ends, but it isn't a solution to have them only on the VPS servers) Web apps seem to be an extremely locked down ecosystem that isn't very p2p friendly.

Next logical step is running the chain locally with a front end/webui talking to localhost , and that is what myself, powerpoint45, techcoderx, and vaultec have been working together with.

Only times I use the full stack locally (more people should have this access and would run steem blockchain on their hardware) is when i'm logged into the witness node on smoke and need to broadcast a transaction per CLI. This is why we need Witness GUI for DPOS as well as front ends for posting data into the chain.
https://github.com/dtubenetwork
https://github.com/techcoderx/ipfsVideoUploader
https://gitlab.com/vaultec/dtubepermanente
https://github.com/powerpoint45/dtube-mobile-unofficial

At no point is this Steem blockchain's fault. It's front end and backend developers who missed the point/access of what BTC core wallet (full nodes) achieved, as bitcoin has over 10,000 live copies online. Steem only has 125.

This comes from lazy development , not pushing hard enough , (even to the brink of failure) innovation.

I often wonder what it would look like if people built integrated hardware solutions. Something like a raspberry pi complete with the full blockchain ready to go, you just plug it in and you have a full node available to you locally. Maybe @anyx's api could be used as well.

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