To hell with Poloniex, I moved my cryptos to Bittrex and will never ever deal with Polo again.
And about handling the increasing workload, you don't need more and more powerful backend machines, the solution is very easy, Steem should redistribute it to all witness nodes, not just the top 20 who are doing most of the blocks creation! You got tens of witness nodes sitting there doing nothing, waiting for their turn to catch a single block! It's ridiculous to have all those resources idling. If the top 20 want to do all the work, why have 200+ backup nodes? I find that design very inefficient. And Dan wants to do the same with EOS? I smell trouble for that platform.
Sure I would prefer Bittrex over Poloniex or for just taking out your Steem to BTC, you can always use blocktrades.us, but nonetheless Poloniex is big and affects whole market.
As for workload, I think you misunderstood. I'm talking about my full API node. You can't run it on witness nodes, or rewriting it better: you shouldn't use witness nodes for anything other than just generating blocks.
Serving API and generating blocks are completely different things and require completely different setup.
Many of new wanna-be-witnesses do not even run their seed nodes so I doubt about their capability of running reliable full API nodes.
Sure, we don't need 200+ runner-up witnesses, 50-100 reliable runner up nodes are more than enough.
Ah thanks for clarifying that. But still, even for backup witnesses, the requirements will increase in the future and the developers need to solve that pending problem too, not just the full nodes.