Upcycling STEEM #6 : Three things that are going to make Steem much much better in the next 3 weeks
There are three things coming out over the next 3 weeks that I think are going to be super important for Steem.
One could be a maker or a breaker. Another will be fantastically useful. The third could move us up a league.
1. MIRA & RocksDB
As Steem has grown, one of the big technical issues has been the ever expanding memory requirements for full API nodes and standard witness nodes.
To solve this problem Steemit Inc has been working on a new architecture involving RocksDB and MIRA (Multi Index RocksDB Adapter).
According to @ned's post from last month (RocksDB and SMTs Announcement) this should dramatically reduce the memory requirements for nodes...
This will result in a 95%+ memory consumption reduction by moving our storage from memory to disk. Ultimately our target is to have Economic nodes (Full Nodes by a Bitcoin standard) running on commodity hardware with 4GB of RAM and a standard SSD.
In that same post Ned included a screencapture of a progress spreadsheet that showed the last RocksDB entry as 25 January mentioning internal testing. Then the spreadsheet moved on to SMTs.
I am possibly clutching at straws but I am hoping that the MIRA work will have reached some state of fruition by the end of January. Or at least some really definite announcement of a completion date by Steemit Inc.
Getting the memory requirements, and thus the very high costs, down will be so important to allow many more full API nodes particularly to come online. This will lessen reliance on Steemit Inc and further decentralise the network.
2. Onboarding
Steem really isn't the easiest platform for newcomers to get to grips with.
The standard signup procedure is slow and off-putting.
Once signed up, it can be rather a bedazzling maze of rather obscure terminology and less than intuitive interfaces.
Unless you are lucky enough to bump into a friendly mentor of some description early on, there is a high chance of drop-out.
Retention on Steem is very, very low.
Now we have a new project called @steemonboarding led by @anomadsoul and @coruscate. This looks very professional, will be available in multiple languages and shows great promise for significantly improving the onboarding experience for newcomers to Steem.
It is understood that @steemonboarding will be launching in the next couple of weeks.
3. Steem Business Alliance
Steem lacks a well-honed, well informed and well appointed front organisation to present the benefits of the Steem blockchain to businesses and investors.
Modelled at least in part on the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance the Steem Business Alliance will be launching very shortly to start presenting Steem to the outside business world.
I am hopeful that the Steem Business Alliance will really be able to move Steem's image up a gear or two.
Full details are still under wraps but Matt @starkerz of @oracle-d has spoken of the organisation several times on the various State of Steem Forums.
It is believed that several of the major Steem DApps and Apps will form the initial member base, before it is opened up to a wider audience.
Matt has suggested that the launch is imminent so I am taking a punt and including it in my three week window.
These are exciting times ahead for Steem in the next three weeks, and indeed the next three months.
Which way the Steem blows may be significantly influenced by what happens in 2019Q1...
[ graphic by @pennsif ]
I truly hope ned will stick to his promises this time. It would be nice for a change. ;0)
I can only applaud the other two initiatives.
Glad to see people are working hard to keep this place alive. We can never have enough people that keep the faith!
Interesting weeks ahead...
Editor of the The State of Steem SoS Daily News.
Promoter of The State of Steem SoS Weekly Forums.
Editor of the weekly listing of steem radio shows, podcasts & social broadcasts.
Founder of the A Dollar A Day charitable giving project.
Everything in the hands of God my dear @pennsif, everything will be fine!
Thank you for your delivery, it is placing your heart.
Thank you for your continued support @darlenys01. It is very much appreciated.
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I've been working on the onboarding too.
I make STEEM accounts available at eBay for people to use PayPal to purchase. Currently, I am adding 90 days delegation of about 20SP which I pay for. I'm trying to make these accounts as affordable as possible.
For the sake of onboarding, I hope that others do the same (even on eBay) and create competition.
One of my goals is education.
I also have a few tutorials that are specific to account keys. Many people jump into STEEM without understanding how to use their keys. Many don't even know that they have an Active key and a Posting key which means that they are solely using their Master key. I've seen a dolphin lose his master key. I've seen newbies lose their username all the time. They pop up on the help channel on steem.chat often.
The problem is that for people that just want to use STEEM as a social media platform are not familiar with how to store their keys or how to use them. This concept is a paradigm shift in login access and requires education.
I offer normal accounts as well as a trial period. The trial period requires the user to utilize the active key and posting key instead of the master key. I retain the master key during the trial period as a service to create new posting and active keys if the user loses them. After the trial period, I make the master key available. Then they can change all their keys and they will have full ownership and knowledge. The trial is for people that don't want to invest and just use the social media aspect of STEEM. For those that want to invest some capital, then the normal account is the best option.
These are just two options that I provide. I welcome others to do this even if it is time consuming. We need as many options possible available for new users to join.
All businesses on STEEM should be offering onboarding without question. Even if they don't have the RC to create accounts, they can most likely find someone to provide the accounts or use the account creation option for 3 STEEM using SteemConnect.