There is a new STEEM White Paper out and there are a few updates that are very interesting.
https://steem.io/steem-whitepaper.pdf
I will admit it was a long time since I read the last White Paper so I forget what was in the first one. Hence, some of the differences might have escaped me.
One thing did catch my attention is the fact that the White Paper discussed scaling. With that garnering so much attention of late with the issues of Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is good to see that this is not being overlooked by the development team.
In fact, it appears they are going one step further and kicking hind-end with their decisions.
Here is the shortened version of it:
In other words, Steem is designed for the architectures of the future
and is designed to scale.
Essentially, the entire Reddit Network could be placed upon STEEM and not overload the system.
Here are the basics.
The Steem network is built upon Graphene, the same technology that powers BitShares. Graphene has been
publicly demonstrated to sustain over 1000 transactions per second on a distributed test network. Graphene
can easily scale to 10,000 or more transactions per second with relatively straightforward improvements to
server capacity and communication protocols.
This is nothing new. 
To achieve this industry-leading performance, Steem has borrowed lessons learned from the LMAX Exchange,12
which is able to process 6 million transactions per second. Among these lessons are the following
key points:
- Keep everything in memory.
- Keep the core business logic in a single thread.
- Keep cryptographic operations (hashes and signatures) out of the core business logic.
- Divide validation into state-dependent and state-independent checks.
- Use an object oriented data model.
I think it is a good idea to learn from those who are able to handle 6M transactions per second.
By following these simple rules, Steem is able to process 10,000 transactions per second without any
significant effort devoted to optimization.
Keeping everything in memory is increasingly viable given the recent introduction of Optane™ technology
from Intel.13 It should be possible for commodity hardware to handle all of the business logic associated
with Steem in a single thread, with all posts kept in memory for rapid indexing. Even Google keeps their
index of the entire internet in RAM. The use of blockchain technology makes it trivial to replicate the
database to many machines to prevent loss of data. As Optane™ technology takes over, RAM will become even faster while gaining persistence.
Page 20 and 21 of the White Paper.
According to the White Paper, the entire Reddit ecosystem did about 250 transactions per second (average) in 2015. Having a blockchain of 10K transactions per second means that traffic on a much larger scale can be handled.
This is all wonderful news. I am not familiar with the new Intel technology but it sounds like they are implementing a new storage system using RAM which will speed things up even more.
All of this is in-line with updates put out by the development team over the last couple months. They are very open that the focus is on the scaling ability of the blockchain to handle more transactions.
Maybe 6M per second will never be reached but it is good to know the handling the traffic will not be a problem on STEEM.
Things keep plugging along.
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