Witness Server Upgraded to New Hardware
The time has come to upgrade my witness server. I started to sync a bit late and went to bed before it finished. I put the final touches to activating the new witness server this morning before leaving for work ;) Here are the main specs:
Xeon E3-1275 v6 @ 3.80GHz
64GB DDR4 2400MHz ECC RAM
2x 512GB NVMe
1Gbps port
The new server should do me good for a while. The blockchain just grows so fast. I remember when I became a witness in January 2017, the blockchain was about 8GB in size. Now it's at about 160GB.
The SSD drives were running out of room. So I have more than double the space I had before, and top-notch NVMe instead of SSD this time around. I should be good to store the chain for some time to come :)
I had a Xeon E3-1246 v3 @ 3.5GHz before, and I think I notice a slightly faster processing of the chain to get the node up. The drives should make a difference. SSD is about 5x faster than HDD, and NVMe is about 5x faster than SSD, and 25x faster than HDD! I'm blazing now!
Disk space is relatively cheap, but RAM is used to process parts of the chain as a shared_memory.bin file which also keeps growing. The size of the blockchain is worrisome to think about for the future. As more people join and post, it will just get bigger at a quicker rate of expansion. Unless the value of STEEM keeps up, more and more witnesses will drop off from the list from being unable to cover costs. Eventually there may not be a top 100, but less than 100, then less than 90, and so on, until only huge RAM servers can sustain the blockchain.
Let's hope for a bright STEEM future :)
On a less bright note, I awoke this morning to see that I dropped 14 spots in the witness list (down to 93). I lost support from a major voter, @thejohalfiles :( Thank you for the vote while it was given :)
Thank you for your consideration and support. Peace.
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me for more content to come!
My goal is to share knowledge, truth and moral understanding in order to help change the world for the better. If you appreciate and value what I do, please consider supporting me as a Steem Witness by voting for me at the bottom of the Witness page.
Sorry to hear that you lost support from a major voter. I don't know the person, but have always heard good things about them. Hopefully they will revisit the idea of giving it back to you soon, as you are what I have thought of as the peoples witness. I understand that (large) investors have more say as they have more skin in the game, but I can't see where you have been unable to support the little people (like myself) without causing undo waves with the upper sphere. You have always been one of the calming voices for me when moves are made towards us smaller fish that I think of as a dick move.
I do believe that by years end, there will be a pump of sorts for the government to collect higher taxes, as well as make more costly examples of those who choose not to report. Not sure if it will be sustained though.
Thanks ;) I appreciate it. It's good to be anonymous in crypto and get away from the violence of the state ;)
Hey, @krnel.
I appreciate the update. Sounds like you're good to go for a while. I thought I read months ago that either they were working on or had just released something that would compress the blockchain so that the hardware specs could decrease. Am I making that up? Otherwise, this is worrisome. I'm wondering if there couldn't be a solution where different machines end up daisy chaining the blockchain—running parts of it and spreading it out even further.
I have no idea if that would work, but eventually, we'll be talking terabytes and beyond of data. Hopefully, that's still a ways off, but Velocity is supposed to bring the hordes (if account claiming doesn't take all the RCs :).
Hopefully thejohalfiles will reconsider, or someone else with high SP will come along. I for one prefer witnesses who are regularly participating on the social/blogging side of the blockchain, so I hope things trend upward for you soon.
Yeah I read that too. I think it's still in the works though... we just have to wait and see...
Yes, my vision was for that distribution of the chain into fragments/segments, I had though of choosing certain topics to host and you can support the content you want to, but that's a bit complex to implement :/
Thanks, maybe I'll get support in the future... maybe not and have to close up shop at some point soon hehe ;)
It is a bit of a catch-22 as the price of STEEM cannot be sustainably high without a large number of users. On the other hand, the size of the chain will grow fast with the growth of users. Without user data monetization by selling it to advertisers there is no choice but to limit new users' ability to interact with the blockchain at least temporally (what I mean is delegating RC to them for limited time period) until they pay to power up to purchase Resource Credits. There's always what we've been doing so far which is rely on crypto-speculators but that cannot be sustained forever.
I wonder how long until advertising is brought in...? Speculation is the main drive fro all crypto valuations... it sucks to be honest that that is where the valuations comes form..
Well, DClick was released very recently. I suppose some people have already begun to use it.
Speculation cannot be the source of STEEM valuation forever. There will have to be fiat revenue streams, too. Monetizing the attention of the users is the main value proposition of the network.
As to the proliferation of ads on Steem, it's hard to say when that will happen. But I find that among the current crop of Steemians there are many who hate ads, even prominent ones. I have no respect for that position whatsoever. They seem to think speculation or voodoo is going to pay the bills forever. But the culture of the platform and its many app user bases will inevitably change with larger scale onboarding.
I think one of the biggest selling points of Steem apps is the fact that while Steem works by monetizing the users' attention like any other platform, everybody, including the users, are stakeholders on Steem (to the extent they have powered up) and get a cut of the profits.
Yeah I don't like ads much either hehe, but I get that it would greatly help to provide some payments to content producers and help the purchase of Steem (unless the ad agency just upvotes because they have delegated SP, then it doesnt change anything for the better... )
It would be possible for any company to purchase SP and market their products on their blog or on an app. They could organize contests and whatnot to reward their customers with upvotes.
congratulation !!
Amazing work!!
@krnel You have received a 100% upvote from @intro.bot because this post did not use any bidbots and you have not used bidbots in the last 30 days!
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Thanks. How do you determine if no one used any bidbot whatsoever? I've never used one, but I'd like to know how you validate that conclusion. Thanks!