Fake STEEM, SBD, witness, market, condencer and so on: Let's test steem for real from now on!

develcuy (58)in #steemit • 6 years ago (edited)

A follow up on: HF20: Why STEEM software development process is broken and why to fix it NOW!

Now that HF20 seems stable and mostly everyone is back on business, can we finally talk about preventing another traumatic hardfork?

How about implementing a working Testnet?

I'm not against it but some people stated (some top20 witnesses included) that it is almost impossible to fully test a hardfork upfront, and I want to say contrary, it is perfectly possible and we can start right away.

Really?

Yes!

Show me the way!

OK... let's see. I'm looking for the right language to explain myself. I talked a lot about cows in the past, but we need something more attractive...

Let's talk about Italian luxury cars!

No, no, no, no, I don't like velocity that much (it remembers me of HF20), I prefer to build something for mass adoption... I have it on the tip of the tongue.

Tesla or Toyota, both are lean

@ned gently answered one of my provocative comments the other day. There he confirms (in a very businessman speech style) that he likes the agile approach. That was enough for me, I already know what to expect from agile companies and agile teams. The infamous release of HF20 is a perfect example. So, I quickly asked for a Lean approach (without mentioning it of course) but I'm still waiting for an answer. Full story here: https://steemit.com/steem/@develcuy/re-ned-re-ned-re-sapphic-re-ned-re-ats-david-re-steemitblog-hf20-update-restoring-continuity-20181001t004050638z

Getting back to cars, have you ever heard of a car manufacturer stating: "We can't test this car before mass production". That would be nonsense don't you think? But, how things work in software, are things really that different between manufacturing and software development?

What is Lean in the first place? Oh wait! If you ignore what it is and you happen to be a witness, a STINC/Steemit Inc. staff or @ned, please educate yourself: https://www.lean.org/WhatsLean/

lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.
^Lean.org

Resources are always scarce, then it makes sense for mostly all companies to at least learn about Lean and to evaluate whether it is the right strategy to adopt Lean.

Guess who invented Lean... Toyota. Guess what is Tesla's manufacturing approach: Lean. Should I say more?

Testing a car before mass production

By the way, nothing is perfect, a Lean company might fail:

We had better get back to the roots, let's build the Toyota way:

The right approach to test future hardforks and softworks: Simulations (or fake steem)

Straight to the point this time. My proposal is to launch a fake-steem, where everything is obviously a simulation. Let's prefix everything "fake-", so that we have: Fake-STEEM(fsteem), Fake-SBD(fsbd), Fake-witness(fwitness), Fake-market(fmarket), fake-steem.com, fake-steemconnect.com, fake-you-name-it. If we make everything functional, we can have a working simulation, where we can freely experiment without the worries.

Making this to happen is not difficult, it just a matter of having the right people willing to do it. But not a hard deal.

Don't copy steem blockchain, just start fresh on every hardfork

Look, I know that maintaining an steem node takes time and that the blockchain has a fair amount of gigabytes, but we don't need to copy the current blockchain with all its transactions. If things are well coordinated, we can have an scheduled launch date for fake-steem HF21. We have a good crowd of spammers and noisy stars in this platform, let them own the testing accounts, they'll generate good noise so that the crowd of STINC along the top20 real witnesses can squash some bugs on softforks and get the real HF21 ready for a smooth release.

Not only the above, there is other approach that would work in parallel: Artificial Intelligence. How about training bots to pull content from real steem? They could generate acceptable input for testing. Also, let the general public to register in fake-steem, so that anyone can contribute real content.

Who will pay the bills?

Ok, running such infrastructure is not that cheap, but not so expensive either. I think that STINC should control fake-steem.com and fake-steemconnect.com. It requires some decent IT infrastructure as well, but they know how to deal with it already.

Testnet vs. Fake-steem

This is most tricky part of my proposal. Both concepts are pretty similar but I want keep the concept of simulation as an invitation to create an alternative space where everything works exactly the same as the real one, except that everyone is aware that it is a fake environment. When manufacturers want to create a new car model, they design it, build it, test it, they find defects and opportunities for improvement, then they design a second version, build it, and so on. At some point they are happy with what they have and order mass production. That is what we need so we should do it, no reason to wait any longer.

What would you publish in fake-steem.com?

Let me answer first: I would copy cat and yell a lot. But I'm definitively going to use it.

How about you?

#hf20 #steem #steemdevs #witness-category

6 years ago in #steemit by develcuy (58)

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cpol (52) 6 years ago (edited)

Interesting points @develcuy! In an MMORPG that I used to play a long time ago, they had separated servers, where they could test new features and fix bugs before rolling these changes to the players. When you see how GNU/Linux Distros work out, they test extensively the software before deploying anything to the public. Both are examples of the same process in a low and a large scale organization to guarantee QA in their software.

I can't understand why Steemit heads refuse the proven methods and good practices in Software Development.

I agree with you a 100% and if Steemit needs more resources to implement such system, they should take a little bit of the pool to finance it, or at least study the way they can do it. It would do a lot of good to have a system like that in place.

Thanks for sharing @develcuy!

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smitop (52) 6 years ago

This is a good idea, but reseting the blockchain state has some issues:

How fSteem/fSBD is distributed. If we go stright to HF21, it will be hard for people (including Steemit Inc.) to get tokens at first. One solution would be for the fake network should just give a bunch of coins to a faucet service
Depending on how fSteem/fSBD is distributed, accounts could too many transactions (and therefore fill up blocks), which would prevent others from transactions.
Test-whales could potentially elect witnesses that never produce blocks (by accident), and effectivly put the network in a unrecoverable state. Unless the elected witness start producing, which might not always be possible.
Hardfork block numbers are hard coded. This would result in fake-HF20 not happening until about 2 years after fake-net launches. Hardfork block numbers will need to be reduced a lot (maybe give each hardfork a day so we can test transitions between hardforks)
- Although, allowing interactions with old forks might cause issues: certain things in the chain code rely on certain events on-chain happening/not-happening. In some cases hardfork checks are removed because a certain thing never happened on the mainnet. For example, at one hardfork, several accounts got a balance increase, for free. (because their Steem got stolen).

BTW replay attacks are protected against already. Chain IDs prevent them.

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1 vote

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devcoin (47) 6 years ago

@smitop, excellent food for though! You are tackling two very important issues:

Security and reliability of fake-steem. Most of your concerns here would be solved with good planing. For example, making a closed launch and going public later. A window of 3 to 7 days before opening the gates seems reasonable to me.
Hardcoded stuff. There are some reasons to hardcode things and fake-steem should be hardcoded as well. It means that the source code should be ready to skip certain things if it is running on fake-steem. Again, this is just a matter of start doing it.

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2 votes

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timcliff (73) 6 years ago (edited)

What you describe as far as the testnet was pretty much what was done for hardfork 20. We had a working testnet that was a clone of the mainnet, did not have the full historical set of data (to keep the block_log size low), and was even getting a copy of the new mainnet transactions mirrored over in real time. There was also a testnet condenser: https://condensertestnet.steemitdev.com.

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3 votes

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develcuy (58) 6 years ago

Yes @timcliff, you are right, so I should elaborate my proposal a bit more. To be more specific, I'm against straight dumping content from mainnet into the testnet, that is why I suggested AI and I should add statistical analysis as well, which should mimic human behavior with an smaller database of content "recycled" (statistically down-scaled) from the mainnet. In means that we should end up with a lightweight fake steem blockchain that can still provide meaningful feedback. I know that it might sound very complicated, but let the big data experts debunk this alternative. I still prefer to let the community play with fake steem freely, AI can come later.