What have I been doing lately?

• Running Steem on a low end, 32bit ARM machine.
• Keeping an eye on the steemd performance (including MIRA).
• Participating in testing Steem Proposal System a.k.a. Steem.DAO.
• Talking to exchanges.
• Helping people with stolen password recovery or those confused about their passwords and keys, especially after the social/wallet split in condenser.
• Convincing (yes, because apparently you have to ;-) ) various entities to upgrade their various nodes to v0.20.10 after latest release.
• Making Steem.Chat great again (read: suck less than Discord)

^{Full HD video rendered exclusively for my witness updates}

Performance

In the 5th episode of Steem Pressure series - Run, block, run
we checked if after crossing the 30M blocks mark we would be able to replay the blockchain fast enough to catch up with the head block in a reasonable time.

With the upcoming MIRA, I hope it will be viable to run steemd consensus nodes on 8GB RAM instances or maybe even less powerful ones?

Steemd on a low end ARM?

Yes!
… but not yet.
I was able to build and run a slightly modified steemd v0.20.10 on a 32bit ARMv7 Processor (v7l)
… at least for a while.
You can get a binary steemd-v0.20.10-armv7l here: https://gtg.steem.house/get/steem/

Some simple changes have to be made to the code to make it build, and these changes are related to stacktrace handling or non-SSE blake2 implementation for the PoW purposes.
And patience. A lot of it, because this CPU is slower than many smartphones used these days.

I can’t reach the head block because of some obstacles. There’s not much point circumventing them before MIRA (as some of them wouldn’t be relevant anymore)

I’ve synced up to 1M blocks in about 4.5 hours.
The speed is not great, and even if it stayed at that level (it won’t) and there were no other issues (there are), it would reach the head block within a week.

Seed nodes review

@timcliff and I have compiled an up-to-date list of nodes and have been running tests to check their reliability.
Kudos to all seed node providers for their service!

Steem.Chat

Making Steem.Chat great again.
A long awaited update recently became possible after 1.0.x version finally became stable.
It was pretty big: 979 commits, 4226 files changed, 194042 insertions, 152984 deletions.
On top of that, we use some minor patches that are not included into upstream release.
Thanks to @followbtcnews for hardware resources and assistance.

If you want to have your Discord server bridged (two-ways) with one of the Steem.Chat channels, feel free to contact me to set it up.

If you want to check how it works, take a look at the #MspWaves-Audience channel on Steem.Chat or its corresponding channel on the Discord server (I can’t provide a link, because, you know what Discord does) ;-)

State of Steem

Produced blocks	32,645,593
Accounts	1,270,184
Blockchain size	194 GB
Consensus state size	50 GB

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^{If you believe I can be of value to Steem, please vote for me (gtg) as a witness on Steemit's Witnesses List or set (gtg) as a proxy that will vote for witnesses for you.
Your vote does matter!
You can contact me directly on steem.chat, as Gandalf}

Steem On