Hey Asher,
I read through this article and all the related articles... and it all pretty much made my head spin. I'm not even going to pretend to know what the best solution forward is.... I just applaud everything you do that helps keeping people engagement and motivated to create actual good content.
I've got a question unrelated to this post completely.... I hope you don't mind.
So, with Bitcoin Blockchain technology... the miners basically keep a ledger of the transactions on their servers... that's the key to the decentralization of it all. It makes it unhackable because you'd have to hit every Bitcoin server at the same time.
In my head, that totally works for every current transaction (and explains the slowness of Bitcoin transactions)... but I'm not sure what that means for every past transaction. Does every miner have 7 years of transactions stored on their server (or is that what the individual wallets do?).
Bringing that back to Steem... as a witness, you process each transaction that happens on the blockchain (moreso if you're in the top 20) but does that mean you also have a record of every transaction that's ever happened on the Steem blockchain from the last 2 years? If not... where is that data kept?
Anyway, thanks for everything dude, you're a hell of a guy!
Thank you for the kind comments - I'm trying to do my bit, there are plenty of us like yourself doing what we can.
Not so many thanks for asking me this question! :P
I believe transactions to be processed/completed (such as the 7 day life of an active post/comment) are in memory.
Completed transactions are stored on the HD/SSD of Full nodes.
Help, somoeone! @paulag @jackmiller