State of public full nodes blows

The current state of non-Steemit Inc nodes is discouraging. More full nodes have come down and I have word another will be coming down soon. I have been debating about making a full node public for a long time now, my timing couldn't be any worse it seems.

api.steemit.com is now a limited node

Certain APIs have been removed from https://api.steemit.com and certain queries do not return complete results. The future of Steemit Inc public nodes is in question, and with the current situation even more so.

The more decentralized and independent we can become, the better for the future of Steem.

Introducing https://rpc.usesteem.com

My full node runs all plugins and is publicly available. As you can see above there are not a lot of public full nodes available and as you can see below there are not many that are actually usable.

If we remain dependent on Steemit Inc's nodes we will be sadly disappointed when and if the time comes they decide to pull the plug on them or drastically reduce their scaling. A lot of people have talked about setting up full nodes but it hasn't happened. With the price situation, the problem will likely get worse.

Performance

While there are things I could do to get more performance out of the node at increased costs, performance is outstanding.

Node	Parallel Thread Sprint Test	Single Threaded Test
api.steemit.com	2.83s 4096/4096 Blocks/sec 1448	00:09.188905
anyx.io	7.44s 3905/4096 Blocks/sec: 524	00:09.544180
appbasetest.timcliff.com	2m11.47s 132/4096 Blocks/sec: 1	04:09.431905
steemd.minnowsupportproject.org	13.40s 4019/4096 Blocks/sec: 299	DNF
steemd.privex.io	1m11.84s 69/4096 Blocks/sec: 0	DNF
rpc.steemviz.com	32.53s 636/4096 Blocks/sec: 19	00:47.118872
api.steem.house	DNF	01:10.861608
rpc.curiesteem.com	1m35.000s 0/4096 Blocks/sec: 0	DNF
rpc.usesteem.com	9.148s 4096/4096 Blocks/sec: 451	00:34.320962