I am @asbear, a standby witness and software engineer with network + security background, the creator of KR Guide Dog, SteemPay, Steemian Health Check, Witness Insignt and many other small tools related to Steemit. I usually work for KR community but occasionally communicate with the other witnesses and the Steemians from all over the world.
We are DPOS, do we have the best witnesses?
Steem is the most successful DPOS supported by the strong community onboard. Every other jealousy blockchain has been trying to diminish Steem, mostly about the imperfection of the witness. I have had a strong faith in DPOS, and trusted that Steem will always have the best people as its top 20 witnesses. But my faith is getting weaker the more I know.
Today I noticed that some witnesses were keeping missing their blocks at the same time, one of them were missing the entire blocks for 2.5 hours. I contacted one of them to let him fix the problem asap, and the reason turned out the network outage in the ISP where their witness nodes are running in. I was quite shocked about this, because this is not professional at all.
How many of the top 20 witness understand what will happen if their ISP is down, and prepared for it? It is not all about missing blocks and losing your profit. It is more about the quality of service of Steem block chain and Steemit of course. Needless to say, this kind of amateurism degrades the reputation of Steem.
Are you concerning geographical redundancy?
DPOS cannot be trusted without the geographical redundancy. Here are the self-check questions.
Where is your witness node and where is your backup witness node?
You should consider running your backup witness node at least in the different ISP, different location or even different continent if possible.
How well are the witness nodes of the top 20 witnesses geographically scattered?
I hope at least one of the top 20 witnesses concerns about it and actually encourages the others to make an effort for it.
How many witnesses are using Privex for their witness nodes?
Privex offers a great deal, and AFAIK many witnesses are using Privex's servers. Their price is much cheaper in Germany so I wouldn't be surprised if many of witness nodes are in Germany. This is ok for standby witnesses but no for top 20 witnesses. I am very interested to see how many witness nodes will be down if there would be network or power outage in Privex's data centre.
How can we avoid using the same ISPs excessively in the similar locations
The best first step is opening up the name og ISP and the region. Then we can easily see what will be the potential problem.
You might not want to open that up. What do you worry about sharing the name of ISP and location your witness node run in to the public? Is the concern theoretically proven? I am open to discuss further about this.
How often are you brushing up your witness vote?
Witness vote makes it all. Things will never go wrong if you vote to the right people. Are you voting to the best people? How often do you confirm they are still the best? Here are the self-check questions.
Are you voting to any inactive witnesses?
Voting to an inactive witness has absolutely no benefit. There cannot be any good reason whatsoever. If you have one, withdraw it.
Are you voting to the witnesses who do not care the security enough?
Some witnesses are still using 0.19.2 that is known to have a security hole. Then voting to the witness who are using 0.19.2 can never be a reasonable choice.
Are you voting to any witnesses with biased feed or not feeding the price frequently?
Price feeding is the most essential work that witness must do with perfection. And it is very easy and cheap.If a witness is not doing his best for feeding price, he does not deserve your witness vote.
The following three websites can help to self-diagnose your witness vote.
https://steeme.com/witnesses
https://steemdb.com/witnesses
https://steemian.info/witnesses
Let us be more professional.
Each top 20 witness earns 7800 Steem Power which is about 24000 USD a month, and they are elected by the community for the best future of Steem. I didn't want to make all the witness my enemy, and also never want to attack anyone. Please do not take this criticism personally.
Amateurism will kill Steem blockchain slowly but surely. Let us discuss as earlier as possible and get stronger together.
I added Utopian tag, as this post includes a very important suggestion for the entire Steemit community.
Update
I blame myself for that my writing could not clearly deliver my point. Sorry if someone felt offended. So I will restate the point especially about Privex.
Somehow at least one person now thinks I am attacking Privex and @someguy123. No definitely I am not. Let me be clear. @someguy123 has been one of my witness votee, as I got a big help from his steam-docker and steemfeed-js projects. And I am also considering moving my witness node to Privex. Thanks to my job, I know security and hardening so I don’t worry about moving out from Google Cloud. Another reason is that they accept STEEM/SBD. I sincerely support the STEEM economy and want to boost it as much as I can. Probably you will not doubt it if you know I am the creator of SteemPay.co.
Here are the key point.
1.If many top 20 witnesses are using Privex without discussing about it (region) each other, we are loosing the geographical redundancy.
- If no one is proactively preventing the witnesses from choosing the cheapest region amongst the location Privex serves, it's natural that witnesses would go for the most economic option, so that we are loosing the geographical redundancy.
- Privex provides only two region, US and Germany, as in the subscription form (https://pay.privex.io/order/). Even if you split your nodes to US and Germany, we are still loosing the chance to improve the geographical redundancy.
This is just one of the most basic principles to consider when you do software architecting. Nothing should be personal and nothing should be even offensive. I really wanted @someguy123 to seriously think about this, and make a strong advice for the witnesses who are deploying their nodes against this principles.
And for those who feel this offensive:
If we are already doing well?
- That a good news, we all are happy. Let’s reassure it and go ahead.
If some of us are doing not the best?
- Still ok! This is a great time to improve that.
If you are doing something wrong, and do not want to change and do not want to be criticised?
- You do not deserve a single witness vote.
If you have any different opinion, let’s talk about it further. Just please don’t take this as an unpleasant criticism and try to blame others.