gtg witness log

"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.

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^{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