32 GB is not that bad still. My seed works with 32 GB with only a modest penalty. 4 GB is of course extreme penalty. I don't suggest anyone do that for production, and I only did it to see if it were possible. It was possible but not practical.
And of course RAM usage will continue to grow, although the budgets allowed by RC result in a fairly modest growth rate. That's a huge improvement where we were pre-HF20, when there was a risk of a rapid RAM blowup. There isn't now.
Yes, and as you probably remember, this was my primary reason for being in favor of RC (and also being opposed to previous suggestions prior to the RC hardfork where the witnesses could have increased blocksize to give everyone more bandwidth).
But while we're not currently risking a rapid RAM blowup, the new rules do put limits on how fast the platform can grow, and I believe that a full rocksdb implementation could alleviate this problem to a large degree.
Agree on that.
The reward pool is only so large, where is the tipping point on users vs rewards?
With stinc's delegations out the pool is already hit, most newbs are wasting their time.
This wishful thinking of taking fedbook's 100m users is unrealistic.
The math doesn't support it.
We should stop that pie before it gets into the sky, imo.
Steemit was never much like Facebook (the nature of it is entirely different), but other social sites like twitter, reddit, or even youtube are better fits as the sorts of models that Steem/it could seek to emulate.
That aside, I'm not sure what you mean about the reward pool only being so large. That, to me, seems to assume that the price of STEEM is a constant. With more users the theory goes that STEEM would be worth more. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. I don't think you can view the reward pool as a fixed amount that inevitably gets divided up into smaller and smaller pieces with more users though.
I don't personally see anything wrong with engineering the blockchain so that it can support more users and usage and to do so with lower costs. Indeed it seems to be a very good thing.