Where is STEEM going and can we scale?

I listened to the Witness forum today and the most important part to me for this experience today was the brief discussion about the STEEM Blockchain Scalability. My interest in Scalability is primarily due to the fact that I own and run a small ColdFusion website hosting company.

I am increasingly becoming more involved in blockchain technology and looking at converting my data center into a STEEM blockchain data center while also hosting other masternodes for other crypto currencies. I have one witness node now running and look to bring up my SEED node by the end of next week and then I hope to add a 512GB STEEM RPC node before the end of Q1 2018.

What I took from the Witness forum on the Scalability issue

Outside of the hardfork 20 that is own its way down the pike....

Currently the STEEM RPC nodes are consuming about 1 GB of additional ram every day
STEEM RPC nodes are already at 256 GB. The cost of keeping up with the infrasturcture is going to eventually trickle down to the lower witnesses.
Hive account@someguy123 runs Privex Hosting, and anonsteem, he stated he is working on growing infrastructure now with the addition of 512 GB RPC nodes.

The introduction of SMT's is going to lead to a lot of new growth on STEEM. Hive account@aggroed himself intends to create at least two SMT's of his own.

Hive account@aggroed stated Steemit Alexa ranking as of today is globally 1,129 and by the end of 2018 we should be in the Alexa top 300 at least for the US Markets and we should have 100,000 "daily active" users by the end of 2018.

In 4 years the STEEM RPC nodes will require 2 terabyte of RAM. That is at the current growth rate. If the STEEMit.com social media network is going to make massive waves in the world of social media the we are looking at atleast doubling the growth rate. In doing so the growth will require servers with more than two terabytes for STEEM RPC nodes in less than two years. Finding 2 terabyte servers that are even remotely affordable is not at this point an easy task. Perhaps in a year this may change. But right now this is going to be a major roadblock for expansive growth.

Optimization is going to be the key to massive growth

Hive account@good-karma stated optimization is going to have to be the route to take.

In order for us to get more bang for our buck as witnesses STEEMit inc. is going to have to focus on optimizing the codebase for If we are to maintain a primary witness ceiling of 20 witnesses without going to 30 or 40 then we are going to have to address this sooner than later.

Currently the STEEM Blockchain is not very well optimized so a lot can be done to improve this optimization before we reach the the massively expensive 2 Terabyte ceiling.

Outside of Scalability

Last thing I took note of was from Hive account@lukestokes that STEEM is not STEEMit. I think a lot of people do not actually understand this. He suggest that users learn the diffrence between the Steemit and the blockchain. That is outstanding advice for the minnows. KNOW YOUR POND!
Listen to the Witness Forum on D.tube

Hive account@aggroed hosts a panel discussion among Top 20 Witnesses: Hive account@roelandp, Hive account@good-karma, Hive account@someguy123, Hive account@anyx, Hive account@lukestokes.

Be sure to vote for these witnesses if you have not already done so. They are lynch pins in our STEEM world.

Just my two STEEMS Worth.
Vote LibertyRanger as your Witness or Set Proxy.
Go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses URL address then scroll down to Vote.

Please follow me @LibertyRanger, Vote Up and Resteem
Thank you,
@LibertyRanger

NOTE: I always upvote same day comments.

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