Stability is crucial to the credibility of the Steemit platform. Right now the "technical difficulties" bieng experienced are having a dire affect on the confidence many people have in Steemit. This is evident by the way the STEEM Price has steadily gone down over the past few weeks, done below $1 per Steem. It shows a lack of confidence in the platform.

We all know the Steemit Blockchain to be a resilient and reliable piece of engineering, but is it really? Well, yes it is. It's not the blockchain itself, but rather how we access the blockchain, and the services we use to process data on the blockchain that seem to be under pressure lately.

A couple of weeks ago there was a DDoS attack on steemit.com which resulted in a lot of frustration across the whole system. That seemed to eventually be mitigated, and yet we are still suffering with a slow and frustrating environment. While some services like busy.org and the eSteem app have not been as badly affected, the whole platform just seems to be struggling. @ned announced a few hours ago here that they are working on the problems, and that the current performance issues are not attributable to another DDos attack. It looks more like engine trouble to me..

alt

This raises a few questions:

Is the latest build of Steemit unstable, and will the next revision fix these issues before we hardfork and add more overheads with SMT's being implemented?
Has the blockchain grown at such a pace that the witness nodes are no longer able to cope with the hardware requirements, causing them to fail frequently and require upgrading?
Are our top witnesses actually competent at maintaining their witness nodes with minimal downtime, and are they proactive in keeping their nodes up-to-date? For the most part I believe they are, but I have some doubts. There are 8 witnesses on a lower build than the others.
Why are there dead witnesses (13 total, and 4 in the top 50) still on the top 100 list, and why haven't they been culled and their votes returned? Just get rid of them if they haven't been active for a while.
Are the public nodes hosting the front-end services being protected from future DDoS attacs, and are they capable of servicing the Steemit community as it grows?

Have Faith

Hopefully the problems get ironed out soon. I'm loving my experience on Steemit, and although I'm not making much rewards on my post, I have met some super people on my journey here. I just don't want to see the whole system come crashing down because the engine isn't strong enough to drive the ship. We need to keep those gear greased.

There is a lot of work that goes into keeping Steemit running, and I really do appreciate all that the Devs and Witnesses do. I can only trust that the right people are in the right positions to weather this storm and get Steemit back on track. We don't need more bad publicity than we already get from the peanut galleries out there.

Steem On!!

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@bearone

Why is Steemit still so sluggish? Engine trouble? | Ecency