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STEEM Issues

This week, STEEM experienced a pretty major issue when several of the RPC nodes services rely on went down. There are several theories as to why the nodes crashed in the first place, but few have much evidence backing them. Whatever the cause, the network experienced a small taste of what it is like to be overly reliant on a single company to provide infrastructure for the blockchain.

New RPC Node (https://rpc.steemliberator.com)

Because of the STEEM issues and the failure of the main RPC node, I decided it would be prudent to launch a new full RPC node that is available to the public. The node is ran and managed by me with support from Hive account@reggaemuffin and Hive account@buildteam. I would like to extend a huge shoutout to all of Hive account@buildteam for making amazing projects for the community. ( Hive account@minnowbooster, Hive account@steemsports, Hive account@steemvoter ... and more to come ) Be on the lookout for continuous development from the team, and be sure to get you some BUILDTEAM tokens while the price is affordable. it wont be for too long ;)

As of right now there is no cost or registration required to access the node at https://rpc.steemliberator.com. If the node gets abused with outrageous network demand, I will likely have to implement an authorization front-end to the node and manually assign people access once their account has been verified. Let's hope it doesn't come to this and I can leave the node fully public and unrestricted.

(The RPC node server costs $150-300/month depending on market prices and network usage. Please help support the server costs by giving this post a 100% upvote, a resteem, and voting for Hive account@netuoso as Witness. You may choose to donate STEEM. If you choose, please include a note in the memo field that you are donating for the server costs; you will be rewarded and your support returned ten-fold.)

Bitcoin Fork

Good news... the Bitcoin fork of 2017 went off without a problem (so far). Holders of Bitcoin on August 1st, 2017 were awarded with an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash after the fork. If you were one of the lucky ones that benefitted from the fork and dumped your Bitcoin Cash as soon as possible, you earned around 13-15% instantly... FO' FREE! Free money is alllllways agreeable with me.

Future Outlook (to the moon)

STEEM has a bright future. However, it also has some glaring issues. The scalability of the network seems to be unsure as of now. There is a lot of development still being done to improve the network for everyone, so if you have any great ideas come join us in https://steemit.chat in the #dev channel and start talking! Also, visit https://github.com/steemit/steem and file issues or pull requests to help the dev team and community.

Vote for Hive account@netuoso as Witness

• Go to the witness voting page on SteemIt.com
• Scroll to the bottom of the page and locate the vote box
  
• Input my name (netuoso) and hit vote.
• Give yourself a high-five for making such an awesome decision

I am currently Witness #51 and need a lot of support to breach into the top #50. Come on, Steemians. I need YOUR help!