Steem didn’t even come close to cracking a sweat
Out of curiosity, what would it look like for "steem to break a sweat?" When a mining-validated chain is under heavy load, we feel it because transactions take forever to confirm, transaction fees are high, etc.
If Steem were under heavy load, I assume the primary way this would be felt is that people would hit bandwidth limits sooner and lots of small accounts would be entirely excluded from participating in the chain. Would there be other symptoms as well?
There are several different metrics as far as blockchain performance. Just in terms of pure number of transactions, the blockchain software can handle significantly higher volume than what it is processing today (many magnitudes more).
The blockchain does enforce bandwidth requirements on users though to prevent one user from overusing the resources of the system. This limit is controlled by a configurable parameter, which the witness have the option to adjust. Users with more SP (users who are more heavily invested in the network) will have higher bandwidth limits than users with less SP.
There are also memory and server requirements for node operators (such as witnesses, and ‘full node’ operators). As the blockchain holds more and more data (mostly content) these requirements do go up. This is not really a concern for the average users though (the people using the platform) as they don’t really care about the requirements for us to support the network - they just care if they can use it.
Even though the requirements have been increasing, they are nowhere near what is required to keep the Bitcoin (and other similar coins) mining operations going to continue supporting those networks. The Steem blockchain is processing far more transactions than BTC, and doing it much more efficiency than both BTC and ETH.
Quoting you below then this place should be worth a lot more than today, hopefully the markets will realize this and raise it !
"The Steem blockchain is processing far more transactions than BTC, and doing it much more efficiency than both BTC and ETH."
This is a good question, your assumption sounds reasonable. I hope someone can point to a post or provide more information about what the steem experience would be if it were "cracking a sweat"
At current capacity Steem could handle around 290 million tx per day according to Block'tivity stats. This would put Steem behind by a factor of 11 in terms of it's ability to handle facebook-like activity at present 3.2 Billion likes and comments per day.
I imagine that if any blockchain-backed decentralized synchronize database messaging system ever got close to being taxed by carrying Facebook-like activity, we'd see migration to a newer, faster – or at least better backend-supported database solution.
That is, after all, what we're talking about – a distributed database with replication which covers keeping track of all the usual things that a forum/social network has to keep up with as well as token transactions.
Or, more succinctly, "if that ever seems to be a threatening situation, I feel pretty secure that some solution will be found by then, because it's going to be a long time before that's an issue."
If we even get close to such activity, Steem makes it completely trivial for the top witnesses to come together to decide to increase the block size.
Magnitudes better than Waitcoin
If that is the case as compare to BTC and other crypto, that is really good to hear. yahooooow...