"One year ago, in a block far, far away..."
gtg found a pow that was included in block 2794856 at 2016-06-30 17:22:21 (UTC)
At that moment, my account, "gtg" (as in Gandalf the Grey), created itself.
Magic, huh?
My first upvote went to @pfunk's mining guide, so I believe that was how I learned how to set up my mining nodes and create my account.
It took me three days to post my introduction.
The traditional, Proof of Work mining (also as a way of creating accounts) no longer exists, and the most effective way to get STEEM is... blogging.
Blogging is the new mining (TM)
Witnessing sunset. Myanmar, 2017
I do not write much. I prefer working behind the scenes, which is why my reputation and other stats such as the number of posts and followers are not that impressive.
I will try to provide better proof of my humanity in the future, but for now let's just focus on witness stuff.
Currently, we are facing various issues:
Onboarding is still complex and expensive,
and lowering the base registration fee below 0.100 STEEM - as I've already mentioned many times - is not a good idea and can have some side effects, such as cheap "name squatting" or cases where accounts whose absolute amount of Steem Power is too low have insufficient bandwidth even for non-excessive usage.
For example, they can't vote because they fall below
#define STEEMIT_VOTE_DUST_THRESHOLD (50000000)
and get: Voting weight is too small, please accumulate more voting power or steem power. error message.
I've delegated a lot of SP to users who were experiencing such issues before it was fixed (by delegating again enough amount by the account creator).
Hopefully, those issues are going to be addressed in the upcomming HF20
"disappearing" posts (comments etc.),
or more precisely actions that despite being performed on the website were never included in the blockchain. Although this bug is rare, we process more and more transactions every day, so it comes up more frequently. There is no solution yet. For now, please make sure that you have a local copy of your story before posting it in case this happens to you.
SBD peg
Long story short, it's going back to its desired values (~ 1 USD), but it is still very unstable and prone to speculations on external markets. Also, please note that prices on Poloniex can't be taken into account because of recurring problems with deposits / withdrawals.
Some service providers that are willing to use the Steem platform have difficulty with its implementation.
Mostly this is because our platform is a whole new universe, full of unique, beautiful creatures, rules and mechanics. It's not easy to tame, and even if they are already interacting with other platforms, there is nothing like Steem. Currently, when demand for everything that's related to digital assets is constantly increasing, the shortage of human resources is a common issue. If you have problems with the implementation of the Steem platform, do not hesitate to contact me.
Poloniex has problems
Another problem is related to two of the above issues. Poloniex has problems. No, not with Steem. They have problems with a dozen or so of different assets including ETH and BTS. Poloniex has problemswith Poloniex. I've offered my help (as I did to many other entities in many other cases). As far as I can tell many other Steem wizards offered their help, too. Multiple times. No reply at all. Things look really bad. Not only for Steem. Not only for Poloniex. This situation is bad for all the digital assets they are supporting and this is also bad for all their users. They are big, they have high volumes. If they don’t improve their communication and services, all that will quickly become a thing of the past.
Resource usage
It's growing and it's growing fast, which is great because this means that Steem is growing, too, but this also causes a lot of problems when it comes to running various Steem services.
I've just recently updated the file with the current amount of memory resources needed to handle various use cases.
Blockchain data takes more than 16GB of storage space.
Shared memory files for:
seed node uses over 5.5GB
exchange node uses over 16GB
full node uses over 65GB
Of course, you can run it on a machine that has less RAM than shared memory file and/or blockchain data, but then you need to have a decent speed of your storage backend.
As resource usage grows, effectiveness of memory mapping goes down and storage backend usage grows.
On my node, I have 3x SSD drives combined to handle workload.
How does this relate to storage usage?
The all time usage average has just reached 10%.
Last month’s average is 17%
Last week’s average is 29%
The average for the past 24 hours has just exceeded 33%
While I have still some spare resources (assuming steady growth), there's no doubt that we will need more and more powerful backend machines to cope with the constantly growing load.
Adding more computer resources is just a temporary solution, but not an optimal way to go, so we are on our way to optimize the whole of the architecture of Steem related services.
50% of liquid author rewards from this post will be donated to support SteemFest2.
That will apply to all of my witness update posts from now on until the end of October.
If you believe I can be of value to steem, please vote for me (gtg) as a witness on Steemit's Witnesses List or set (gtg) as a proxy that will vote for witnesses for you.
Your vote does matter!
You can contact me directly on steemit.chat, as Gandalf
Steem On
Hello @gtg, thank you for being a Steem Witness and thank you for dedicating your time and energy to supporting this platform. I wish I knew more about the technical terms and how Steem operates but I am just a video gamer. I hope that we as a community can grow smoothly and soundly without any hiccups because Steemit isn't going to stop any time soon, it will be something massive one day.
Same hopes here. Thank you :-)
Indeed, much of the magic began back then :)
Any ideas if there will be some kind of compression going on for old posts / archives? if that even makes sense here.. lol.
Steemd in its current shape is not the best tool for robust content delivery to end-users, but in the end, it does not need to do all the work in a way it does currently. We can use specialized data service and json reverse proxy which could help us a lot to scale. I see bright future ahead. :-) (No, not a train-light-in-the-tunnel kind of bright ;-) )
Hi @gtg, I have just voted you as a wittness and I am following you. Our BCN has been jammed for weeks now in a Poloniex account! I have just posted my introduction, you can find it here: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@speed-harry/introduce-myself-speed-harry
Hi @speed-harry, thank you. I just saw your intro, nice one. Good luck! :-)
Just half an hour ago I became a victim of the disappearing posts issue and I had to remake it from scratch. I hope a solution can be found. Anyway, I am glad we have some smart people here on the website to look after the issues and actively looking for a way to dismantle them.
I'm sorry for that.
Yes, most awesome thing about this platform is that it has tons of people actively trying to improve it every day.
This is how witness logs should be, as entertaining as it is informative! Keep up the good work, you're an asset to the Steem community.
Thank you :-)
First time I've tried to add some story to it (and having recently my Steemversary was a good opportunity to do that)
As per me the cost of onboarding should not be lowered .. the current cost right now filters much of the unwanted spam people :)
Spam people would come here anyway, problem is that to onboard them, someone needs to pay for it. Currently most of accounts are created (and funded) by Steemit Inc. I would rather see their funds be directed on development work instead of paying for new users.
Still kind of in the beginning and hopefully it just gets better and better... there will always be room for improvement! That's life and without it, it would be boring... :) and to Poloniex, they have some shitloads of problems... The support never replied to any emails from anyone I think... had to aboard it and go to Bittrex for now at least....
Thanks for the great post and maybe see you at STEEMFEST² looking forward to meeting some great people :) I even made a traveladvice for Lisbon Steemfest :)
Thank you, see you on SteemFest2 :-)
Thank you for continuing to support Steemit! I was looking at the Hardofrk 20 suggestions and see quite a few promising things. The ability to mine a new account into existence using scrypt asics was an interesting thought.
True, definitely bringing back that awesome feature is a great news.
(Ability to create an account via mining without involvement of third parties)
I cant wait for that, I would not mind having an extra account or two. Might be time to dust off those old asic scrypt miners.
@gtg when I made my first post, you upvoted it. I just wanted to get back and say thanks. Voted for you as a witness. Keep up your good work.
Thank you :-)
Thank you @gtg for all you do for the community. I happily voted you as a witness.
Thank you :-)
🤣
I known you when I see you are in 3nd position of Witness list and I like our post and they are useful for me thus I followed to read your post :)
Thank you :-)
very impressve
Vote and followed you
Very impressive sir !
follow you and upvotes you
Mannn I totally second what you wrote about @poloniex!
Also, I wrote a post about disappearing posts/comments. It's happened to me a couple of times!
BTW, what is the registration fee now? I thought it was
0.200 STEEM?Current consensus is at
0.200 STEEM, mine is set to0.100 STEEM(price is going down so I'd consider increasing it back to0.200 STEEM.Nice Analysis
Appreciate your work
Plz check out my work..
Special Thanks @gtg
Nice story man! Wish you good luck!
Thank you :-)
What can be done to keep SBD pegged at $1?
I'm loving the Steem T-Shirt with that beautiful landscape haha.
Thank you for all your great work as Witness!
While we have some tools to help it go back to $1 from below ( bias and APR ) it's not much we can do while it is trading too high (or at least not without bad side effects, in my opinion of course, because there were different points of view on that matter, more you can find in some logs posted earlier)
Happy B'day .... Born and brought up in steem for the past 1 year :)
Thank you :-)
i really appreciate ur nice analysis
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.
This is a great peek into the nuts 'n boltz of tha Steemit ! You all are truly algorithmic guru's & whizbangs !
Thank you for these information !!
I think bittrex that is better than phoenix.
good lock
Thank you :-)
Wow..its photo is sunset of BAGAN of myanmar.it is our ancient town.
I am from MYANMAR.
Thanks@gtg
Beautiful place.
I am newer user here.
Please study on me.
:)
Thank you :-)
I don't understand anything about crpyto or mining but I must say that I find Gandalf the Grey more sympatic then Gandalf the White
And a lot more practical outfit ;-)
I like how that sounds, never heard that before until now.
Resteemed. Wanna make a new trading platform?
Thank you. No, no time for that, I just want to have good, secure and reliable platforms around to use :-)
Yes I agree with all the comments
Like$
Thank you :-) I've made them just before that trip.
good
Tank you Gandalf
You do not need to proof your humanity more than you have done my friend, if people want to know just need to go to the "introducemyself" channel in the Steemit.Chat and see how you work there helping newbies to sort it out the way in Steemit! Since a long time!
Happy "gtg" birthday! :) and thanks for the update. It is crazy how is growing Steemit the last month. Cheers!
Edit: And Bittrex all the way for me since the beginning, I never liked Poloniex ;)
Thank you :-)
Are you using 64GB+ RAM on your full node? Or RAID SSD's ?
SSDs in RAID (x3)