As a former witness operator, I have had intimate dealings with the software that runs the Steem blockchain. Since I first started working with it, back in November, and gradually getting worse until now, the rate at which the blockchain replay takes place (necessary to get an RPC server running, which is necessary to run Steem based applications), has slowed down at an alarming rate.

Note that facebook uses massive clusters of a specialised database that has the ability to break the database apart, and runs queries entirely in memory, in giant data centers. Steem's success necessarily will cause this database to grow beyond the capabilities of graphene, and even, eventually into the size of a database like Reddit or Facebook (at least, circa 2-3 years ago).

Because I was curious to understand why, it turns out that the database system, Graphene, a graph database, is very unsuited to storing the data of a forum like this. The memory utilisation becomes enormous and at a certain point, the process of creating search indexes out of the transaction log (blockchain) basically goes on for eternity.

It already goes very slow. 6 weeks ago I was trying to get an RPC up and running so I could do some development of Steem based applications. 2 weeks later, I still was unable to get one running. Yes, I stopped the process a few times through that, but I should not still be waiting for an RPC replay to finish 3 days after I start it. You can imagine how inconvenient that is with a computer basically doing nothing productive for this long, and no certainty it will ever finish doing anything. I certainly was not going to be able to do any kind of programming that required access to the database.

If something is not done soon, everything will go offline. Steemit.com, all the exchanges, and all the steem apps.

People think I am just being a chicken little about this, but just look at the situation. Poloniex trading in steem is down now for over a month. Changelly ditched steem some time ago. Only blocktrades, one of the founders, and bittrex are still functioning. The frequency of outages at steemd.com and steemdb.com is becoming alarming.

If those remaining two exchanges go offline at the same time, you can't sell your Steem.