One big problem I see with this, how does this affect the steem infrastructure?
As I can see it at the moment, steem has already a huge problem with the existing load. Doesn't that put even more load on it? I mean, let's consider mass adoption of this, this could simply double the load of the blockchain, and we already know that distributed ledgers which rely on bft never scale well.
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You're right that mass adoption of the messenger could increase the load. But my understanding is that @ned wants to have mass adoption for Steem.
And in that case: changes to improve scalability have to be made anyway.
Of course, they want mass adoption, but since full-nodes are barely taking it at the moment already, this means they're nowhere close to that goal yet. Additionally, every scalability has a limit, and a chat service like that, considering mass adoption, could simply have 10 times the load of the blockchain itself.
Which means, with growing adoption it would have to scale 10 times better with this chat than they'd have to without.
We're using but a small percentage of the whole potential that this has. I read that we're using around 3% of the max load at the moment. The problem we've been having with bandwidth recently is due to people spamming the blockchain, but I think that it's been solved with a node update by most major witnesses.
Besides, the more people that join the blockchain, the higher the requirements will be for witnesses. They will have to adapt and the blockchain's capacity will increase correspondingly to the increase in users and activity.
I'm not talking about the blockchain itself, while that's not a problem now, this will definitely be one in the future, especially with chats like that spamming the blockchain. The problems I'm talking about are the full-nodes which are already at the tipping point of them not being able to catch up anymore (At the moment they're barely coming along with 500GB RAM). While the blockchain is an important part to be scalable, there are a lot of other components involved as well.
Damn, I didn't know that the nodes were in such a saddened state. Will the Witnesses be able to handle them if they put more RAM? Would it be affordable?
The Problem is not about the witness nodes, the problems are the full nodes.
The Steem devs have pointed out in their last post that they're working on something to improve the situation. But I guess a lot of things will need a rewrite until this system starts scaling better.
Hello @raycoms, maybe you should have a look to the REAL Steem Messenger : https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@kingswisdom/steem-messenger-v0-0-3-private-beta-session-image-encryption-and-many-more
Everything in Steem Messenger happens out of the blockchain, in a permissionned database. More on our security protocol this weekend.