Witness Update - RPC Node + Blocksize parameter update

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RPC Node

At Curie our focus is and always will be community development, support and the sustainability of the Steem platform. In accordance with our core focus, we have brought up a full node for further node reliability to support the Steem platform.

We’re running our full node on 256GB Ram which is enough to hold most of the shared_memory in-memory, hence making our full node fast and reliable.

Our fullnode is available for API requests at: https://rpc.curiesteem.com/

Specs:

20x Core Xeon architecture CPU, 256GB Ram, 1.5TB SSD, 1Gbit Dedicated Port.

In the coming weeks we plan on bringing up a backup full node and implement load-balancing such that we can sustain 2 of these full nodes, node balanced to our node RPC point in order to make the API point significantly more reliable for future use as the RPC point becomes used more frequently.

Blocksize parameter

It has become evident over the past month or two, that we are testing significant bandwidth limitations due to the current blocksize of 64kb, due to this we ran a vote amongst our curation team, reviewers and operators in order to decide whether it would be best to stick with a 64kb blocksize, or to move to something slightly larger (like 96kb or 112kb) which would allow for newer users to not be restricted by bandwidth in the future.

It was unanimously decided that blocksize should increase with all information provided, however, the blocksize most voted for was 96kb and hence we have updated our witness blocksize to reflect this consensus.

We suggest any current top-witnesses (who many have discussed the situation either in posts/elsewhere) to take a look at blocksize and bandwidth to make an informed decision with respect to the future growth of the Steem platform about their current blocksize parameter.

For more information about Hive account@curie and all its activities you can read our whitepaper https://steemit.com/curation/@curie/curie-whitepaper or check out the pdf file at http://curiesteem.com/#whitepaper, vote for Hive account@curie as a witness and follow us Hive account@curie!