STEEM Is A Blockchain On Steroids: 6 Million Transactions Per Second!!!
There is a new STEEM White Paper out and there are a few updates that are very interesting.
https://steem.io/steem-whitepaper.pdf
I will admit it was a long time since I read the last White Paper so I forget what was in the first one. Hence, some of the differences might have escaped me.
One thing did catch my attention is the fact that the White Paper discussed scaling. With that garnering so much attention of late with the issues of Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is good to see that this is not being overlooked by the development team.
In fact, it appears they are going one step further and kicking hind-end with their decisions.
Here is the shortened version of it:
In other words, Steem is designed for the architectures of the future
and is designed to scale.
Essentially, the entire Reddit Network could be placed upon STEEM and not overload the system.
Here are the basics.
The Steem network is built upon Graphene, the same technology that powers BitShares. Graphene has been
publicly demonstrated to sustain over 1000 transactions per second on a distributed test network. Graphene
can easily scale to 10,000 or more transactions per second with relatively straightforward improvements to
server capacity and communication protocols.
This is nothing new. @dan posted a couple years ago about hitting the 1,000 transactions per second. The key, however, is to be able to handle much higher levels of interaction on this blockchain. It seems the development team is following the model that does that.
To achieve this industry-leading performance, Steem has borrowed lessons learned from the LMAX Exchange,12
which is able to process 6 million transactions per second. Among these lessons are the following
key points:
- Keep everything in memory.
- Keep the core business logic in a single thread.
- Keep cryptographic operations (hashes and signatures) out of the core business logic.
- Divide validation into state-dependent and state-independent checks.
- Use an object oriented data model.
I think it is a good idea to learn from those who are able to handle 6M transactions per second.
By following these simple rules, Steem is able to process 10,000 transactions per second without any
significant effort devoted to optimization.
Keeping everything in memory is increasingly viable given the recent introduction of Optane™ technology
from Intel.13 It should be possible for commodity hardware to handle all of the business logic associated
with Steem in a single thread, with all posts kept in memory for rapid indexing. Even Google keeps their
index of the entire internet in RAM. The use of blockchain technology makes it trivial to replicate the
database to many machines to prevent loss of data. As Optane™ technology takes over, RAM will become even faster while gaining persistence.
Page 20 and 21 of the White Paper.
According to the White Paper, the entire Reddit ecosystem did about 250 transactions per second (average) in 2015. Having a blockchain of 10K transactions per second means that traffic on a much larger scale can be handled.
This is all wonderful news. I am not familiar with the new Intel technology but it sounds like they are implementing a new storage system using RAM which will speed things up even more.
All of this is in-line with updates put out by the development team over the last couple months. They are very open that the focus is on the scaling ability of the blockchain to handle more transactions.
Maybe 6M per second will never be reached but it is good to know the handling the traffic will not be a problem on STEEM.
Things keep plugging along.
If you found this article informative, please give it an upvote and resteem.
Optane is a kind of memory: slightly slower (but much cheaper ) than RAM and faster than Flash-memory (SSDs).
Good choice for blockchain relaited tasks!
Thanks for the input @master-set.
Not being a bit and bytes guy, I only go by my reading...good to have verification from someone with insight into that stuff.
Seems the development team made a wise decision on that one.
I uploaded the old one for you, from August 2017. I downloaded it about 12 days ago.
IPFS Hash
Shortened link
xxx
Otherwise, I think number of transactions is not enough to determine the value of the system, because of sooo many micropayments. (0,001 Steem for me? Thanks a lot.) Volume also matters, number of active users etc.
Yep this is true:
https://www.widebitcoin.com/a-visa-cryptocurrency-might-only-be-worth-3-billion-napkin-math/
This is interesting. Maybe in the future we will discard disk drives and keep everything in RAM.
Woo!
I remember one of the first things I learned about the ethereum blockchain was that Vitalik wanted to be able to handle more tps than Visa. I think he listed 2kps. I was so stoked to hear people thinking that far forward.
Lol silly eth. Steem has this shit under control.
Yeah I always feel sad for people talking about Bitcoin and Ethereum when Steem exist. They just don't know lol.
Tell em!
Roger Very is a bch evangelist, be a steem evangelist!
Naw ETh scaling plan is 1 million tps:
https://bravenewcoin.com/news/vitalik-ethereum-en-route-to-a-million-transactions-per-second/
Bitcoin scaling plan is the LN+(sidechains):
Each channel can process about 500 tx per second(a channel is when a node opens a connection with another node. This can be done many times with same nodes). LN is now limited by the number of nodes.
Source:
https://coinjournal.net/scaling-layer-2-and-cryptographic-innovations-discussed-at-consensus-2018/
Also transaction does not mean ever day:
https://www.widebitcoin.com/a-visa-cryptocurrency-might-only-be-worth-3-billion-napkin-math/
But yeah Steem has this in the bag. All of these scaling plans are not on chains. A decentralized social network can't work off chain otherwise how can you read the data?
Steem has some much potential-I can't wait :)
With all those SMTS steem will be even more powerful :)
Don't get me wrong: I would absolutely LOVE for BTC and ETH to be as scalable as steem. I've got plenty of love for all of em.
Almost completely agree with you (Don't like Eth much) but other than what you said is true.
If I understand you right, it means Steem will soon Surpass all cryptocurency in the market, well, just want you to know that I already know that already due to the current trends in the market.
Steemit in years to come will become the building block of other platform, an architectural masterpiece on its own.
Cant say what the market will do. The graphene based blockchains can handle more volume and scale a lot better than those that are not graphene.. yet the market values them.
This updated White Paper has come at the right time when we hat hit records with the Blocktivity.info stats .
I have skimmed through the whitepaper and it seems very simplified for even a non crypto person! Kudos for that.
This part below will be of help in my explanations going further of how Steem is distributed!
Page 11 of White Paper
To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.
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Handling this much traffic means that Steem is ready to reach top 10 or it just means that there is an update and which not going to give any advantage over other cryptocurrencies in terms of eye catching technological advantages.
What is great, the Steem blockchain is ready to handle the massive load of traffic and transactions! People are expecting to have a webpage to load in less than 3 seconds!
That´s the thing, we can´t be overloaded, so when the masses start to see what they have been missing, the price of STEEM will sky rocket, and the lucky early adopters will be sitting on a mine of gold.
We are already proving that we are one of the best blockchains out there, and facts like this only makes us stronger.
A point missed by most. People look at price and marketcap when deciding what is the best.
It appears that we are seeing the development team add the necessary components to ensure this blockchain has the power behind it to handle whatever is thrown at it in terms of traffic.
Exactly, people who don't see the power and judge this project based on the price might get confused, but even then we see reports like "Weiss report" always scoring us as one of the best blockchains.