This is just me doing, again, what too many people were too scared to do. Some crazy man has to do the dangerous things first, before everyone realises they are not dangerous.
I will do the necessary work to make sure that the chain does not crosstalk with steemit's blockchain, and keep everyone in the loop, I am syncing the old chain now, and once that's done, I am writing a script that will do the edits I plan, to remove the premine power, to snapshot everyone's account (including login, so they can just use the same login) with their balances as at the snapshot, and basically, once we get over 20 people willing to run witnesses on the new chain, we announce the date of the snapshot/unpremine procedure (I will make sure it 100% works before this), and on that date, the chain will be snapshotted, cleansed, reformed, and all the new witnesses will have this new block_log distributed via bittorrent, and then they can get it up and running, and off we go.
It should be all done by the end of the month. I am syncing the chain now, and once that's done, I will be converting the chain to JSON, and publishing that, and then start working on The Purge, which I suppose will be the name I use for the script that cleans the chain and compiles the account snapshot. That script will be open sourced and on the new repository, and well documented, so people can start a debate about exactly how the purge should operate, what date and time it should delete, and whether the deleted SP should be returned as an initial preload to the rewards pool (this might also make it easier to get running, since this should cover that first week as it fills up).
The full RPC witness nodes run with 32GB RAM and uses an SSD RAID array for swap according to @gtg. Is that the magic sauce you were after! ;)
Doesn't seem like a great idea to use SSD like that, but I don't know enough about the MTTF for drives these days - maybe it's not too bad. Also I read about 'NVM Express interface', which make this more reasonable, and since most of the access is reading and not writing, perhaps this is scalable to a greater degree than we thought, you can get 2TB SSD drives now.
Seemingly the reliability is a problem with this approach though, perhaps as the memory is expected to be faster than SSD speeds?
He said 3 drives and RAID 1, but not sure whether he mean just 2 for the RAID, or 3.
To be absolutely fair, I haven't seen evidence of him lying directly, but there does seem a tendency to obscure the details somewhat ;)
It's not cheap to get remote facilities like these is it? I won't be attempting it on a standard VPS any time soon!
Yeah, maybe. I thought Bulgaria wasn't too bad, but maybe it varies a lot. What do you think the minimum practical bandwidth is? I can't seem to find that anywhere.
I'd guess somewhere around 20mbit.
Right, trying a few shows the European ones are <20ms and US <200ms. I have 20mbit, not sure I can afford to tie it all up though!
this sounds absolutely awesome!
but won't it be a bitch to reprocess the chain deducting all the effects of all votes and everything after the premine SP has been purged?!
I don't understand enough about this stuff, so probably you won't have to bother and answer that.
just sayin, kudos, that's a bold plan!