Transaction speed and throughput come at steep costs to decentralization. It's laughable that it costs more to run a Hive node than a bitcoin or ethereum node. We have people running Geth nodes on damn Raspberry Pis (See https://twitter.com/EthereumOnARM). We're already seeing functionality on Hive like get_content being moved out to centralized dbs (Hivemind) and this despite negligible economic activity on Hive. It's a slippery slope. Meanwhile, ethereum and bitcoin continue to transact billions every single day. This is what I consider true decentralization, and Hive does not offer it. You probably disagree, and that's OK, we'll have to agree to disagree. I'll say, though, that you'll find yourself in the overwhelming minority.
I'd point you to this post for more details: https://hive.blog/crypto/@liberosist/understanding-why-bitcoin-and-ethereum-have-high-fees-and-sustainable-solutions
Fortunately, solutions like zK rollups and sharding are sustainable solutions that'll bring scalability to crypto without sacrificing decentralization and security.
Oh man.. The cost to run a node now is almost 10x less than it was when I started witnessing on steem... Fuckin' spent a grand a month on servers almost at one point.. That was not fun at all.
You can run a basic node to carry out transaction broadcasts and to scrape blocks off of on a system with a bit less than 8GB RAM now adays, however the time it takes to get these economy setups going is measured in days due to the nature of the data replays.
Not sure how many transactions ETH processes but BTC is no where near billions of daily transfer operations, it's not even capable of such operation bandwidth as far as I know unless bitcoin core has had serious improvements since I last dug into it.
Hive is a distributed ledger.. As for if one can call a network where the vast majority of transactions are processed by the (usually) same 20 servers decentralized is something I'll leave open to everyone to think about (personally I think it's not nearly as optimal as it could be). Over half of all BTC mining occurs in China which in theory could lead to a chinese 51% attack if they all worked together.. While BTC and ETH are better decentraliztion wise neither of them is so decentralized they are untouchable.. :/
As far as API calls being indexed by external databases that is one of the few ways to make calls to fetch old data seamless from a users perspective. It takes less time to query a localized DB than it does to have the hive API go and search for it.. From a technical standpoint it makes sense.. Think of HIVE as a hard drive and the hivemind as a sort of RAMdisk.
Will have a look at these projects you mention. Always interested to see what type of new and innovative shit guys are coming up with!
I know things have streamlined a lot, but it's still nowhere near good enough. Call me when you can run a full Hive node on a damn Raspberry Pi like you can on ethereum.
Definitely look up ZK Rollups. 3,000 TPS on Eth1.x today. Like I said, Loopring Pay or zkSync has been doing 3,000 TPS, 0.3 second finality, <$0.01 fees for several months now. The makers of Gods Unchained are releasing their own custom zk Rollup for gaming/NFT applications with similar scalability. Same for Curve. Synthetix, Uniswap and other massive DeFi apps are using Optimistic Ethereum, a competing rollup scaling solution. Things are moving fast. We don't know yet what Reddit are using, but they are going to offer free/near-free transactions with <0.5s finality on ethereum through whatever scaling solutions they use. Same for Curve. Synthetix, Uniswap and other massive DeFi apps are using Optimistic Ethereum, a competing rollup scaling solution. Things are moving fast. We don't know yet what Reddit are using, but they are going to offer free/near-free transactions with <0.5s finality on ethereum through whatever scaling solutions they use.
When Ethereum 2.0 Phase 1 releases next year, that'll bump up throughput to 100,000 TPS, which is light years ahead of anything Hive can do.
The key difference, though, is that ZK Rollups is backed 100% by the security of the main chain.
I agree that PoW flawed, and I know you hate ethereum, but maybe you should check out Ethereum 2.0. This, in my opinion, is the first attempt at a truly massively decentralized blockchain network. Anyone with stake can run their own validators on cheap hardware. We'll have hundreds of thousands of validators. I believe it is significantly more resilient than PoW and of course DPoS.
Once you really look at the innovations in crypto, I think everyone will come to only one conclusion - Hive is falling far behind. In 2016, Steem was great tech. In 2021, it's a dinosaur. I'm here warning you of the meteor impact, I hope you all listen and prepare for it.
In order for HIVE to run on a Pi the specs on those would have to come up a bit more, mainly in RAM size.. Or the entire graphene engine beneath HIVE would need reworked in a way to allow it to run queries and replays concurrently on multiple threads of a CPU.. While possible in theory the cost in time and skill it would take to complete this is likely prohibitive sadly.
Interested to see how Eth 2.0 does honestly.. I for the record don't hate ETH but rather am dissapointed on how they destroyed what would otherwise be an amazing project by deciding to break the cardinal rule of allowing changes to a chain after blocks have gone past that height.
Will certainly have to look into these other projects. 0.3 second operation responses is fucking INSANE if it's actually able to confirm across the entire network that fast!
POW while cost prohibitive to attack almost all circumstances is an expensive way to secure a chain as far as energy consumption is concerned. Sure it's the original method and time tested but it's also archaic when you look at advances in other fields of IT work.
A truly "every mans" crypto that would favour proper decentralization and be resistant to stuff like mining farms or ASIC development that could be run by anyone ultimately would be the cure all for this.. Perhaps as global high speed internet becomes something accessible to everyone blockchain systems will piggyback on the infrastructure and ultimately become a widely used and accepted method of finance.