Steem Witness Forum Record: @andrarchy, @roelandp, @lukestokes, @aggroed, @drakos discuss the Steem ecosystem

This is the discussion that we had today regarding Steemit Inc and the Steem blockchain. I'd like to extend a large thank you to Hive account@andrarchy who spent an hour with us sharing some concerns and perspectives from Steemit HQ. As you may not know Hive account@andrarchy is Director of Content at Steemit. He's in a unique position as the guy crafting the message to share some language that can be used to describe this ecosystem, this blockchain, and the vision of what we're trying to accomplish.

Here's the Discussion

Steemit

I hear a fair amount of unreasonable discussions of what Steemit should and shouldn't be doing. I appreciated Hive account@andrarchy's candor of what is and is not Steemit's responsibility. He's on the show for the first hour or so.

A major concern: chain bloat

We spoke a bunch today about concerns over scaling. Hive account@andrarchy's answer was essentially I'm not an engineer, but they're working on it. Some of it is user error of putting to much in RAM and some is program changes that will allow more to sit in fast hard drives. This seems pretty important as many of the public full RPC nodes (like the Minnowsupport node Hive account@followbtcnews runs on behalf of that group) are currently using 512G of ram. We're seeing 256g servers failing although it is possible. These are expensive and cost hundreds of dollars a month. For folks looking to build new dapps and apps on the chain they need these servers to interact with the chain.

So, the concern is there for witnesses now, and it's good to know that it's a priority at Steemit to make it better.

Witness Project

The Minnow Support Project is my major contribution to the Steem ecosystem. I founded the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Discord Server, which now has 16k Steemians as a part of it. Inside of there we run the Minnow Support Project, which is a witness run public organization designed to spread the values of Peace, Abundance, and Liberty, grow the Steem ecosytem, and train and retain minnows on the platform. This project has given a digital home to thousands of people, helped spark projects, launched witnesses, sent minnows into trending and is a source of fun and comraderie.

Additionally, within PALnet we have a streaming broadcast station called MSP-Waves. The station now has over 30 hours of live broadcasting every week. This forum is just one of the ways that I can help the community by bringing together members of the community to talk about what they're working on or perform and ultimately grow the overall ecosystem through human connection.

If you think these are valuable contributions to Steem I'd ask that you please vote for my Witness if you don't already.