Thanks for this great explanation! Makes sense that a large part of the degraded experience is the single API, preventing falling back to alternative APIs.
The first is the fact that a significant number of backup witnesses are not producing blocks. As you mentioned, this causes constant micro-forks
So the frequent micro-forks were more of a consequence of backup witnesses being offline than backup witnesses including transactions violating Softfork 0.22.888 causing their blocks to be orphaned?
It was the rules of Steem 0.22.8888 softfork that were violating consensus rules of Steem (
v0.22.1- latest official release). Ifaliceis scheduled for block production and her node is offline, then it misses the block, and next scheduled witnessbobproduce the block with all the transactions that were supposed to be included. In this case user can experience 3 seconds of extra delay.Malicious Steem witnesses (a.k.a. technologically illiterate bunch of idiots) colluding, running their softfork code that were refusing to accept blocks with valid Steem transactions (but ignored by softfork) were causing not only such delays but also microforks and other side effects.
Steem is no longer decentralized blockchain. It's 100% Justin S. controlled piece of garbage.