Steem SMT Ideas: A Full P2P Setup for STEEMD - Post #44
Nothing is impossible I humbly believe so; this is evident in my autistic son’s Report Card, no words as a kid, lots of good grades. This always amazes me as to how he did it……...
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A HUGE SMT FUTURE WILL DEMAND MORE MODULAR SEED NODES
I am hoping that this post will reach the most open-minded tech hands in all of the STEEM community.
This will be my contribution to the recent buzz on the SMT offering of STEEM. As I had observed that most people are more on the “business” aspects as far as their ideas are concerned, I will be offering a technical side manifestation as far as accommodating the future of STEEM as it carries along the Smart Media Tokens.
First off I need to declare that I am a technical person and knows what I am talking in this post, spending almost all of my professional life tinkering on IT Systems and solutions. I love challenges, to solve the seemingly unsolveable. I always approach technical problems head-on which I must admit not always popular, and yet very effective in solving extreme System problems.
In this case of ours on the STEEM SMT offering, let me offer a solution that will at least give in advance a technical glimpse of what we need to achieve platform and Systems wise. The past day’s announced DDoS attack is one clear reason why we need to focus on “securing” the blockchain first so that all else will just flow smoothly as foreseen and envisioned by our good hearted inventors thru the SMT offering.
I believe we are making history here guys, all of us and not one be left behind. It is the purpose of this post that we will be known in the future as the people who stopped DDoS head-on by “hacking” our own System, of course as the “ethical” ones.
May this reach the very core technical people of STEEM and STEEMIT, this can greatly improve all of our lives here at the tech level by approaching unsurmountable problems; exactly like what the ants do.
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SIMPLE YET SO SO MANY WILL BE OUR KEY SOLUTION
Let me throw a question: How much packets do you think a DDoS attack issues at the very “gate” of any network it wants to take down?
The answer will be lots, so so lots of packets that we need not count anymore as we can just observe the crippling effect thru our Systems. Let me take the old wars for example where people fight with just swords and skills, my next question is: Who do you think will win in a war, the side with a hundred soldiers or the side with a million soldiers? The answer is also obvious here, of course the side with a million soldiers will clearly win.
Let us move then to the example attack as DDoS, let us say a million packets per second is the threshold for a service to choke off, if this million packets will arrive on a single server surely it will drain off the bandwidth so easily. But what if the hackers themselves needs to “divide” their intended packets firstly before reaching one "service" (take note not server)? Say in the future a hacker needs to divide off the packets between two servers (for one service) what could have been done nowadays for just one? If this happens, this will surely give any server the chance to “fight off” any attacks by just multiplying its numbers.
All the present descriptions of a “resilient” System nowadays are all but hyped. Why hyped? It is because all of the Companies wants to fight off the hackers the “non-hacker” way. This is an impossible task as far as I am concerned, because the “numbers game” will surely favor the hackers in both the ratio of hackers-to-a-Company or malicious-packets-to-a-Server. We need to divide and conquer the bad guys, but to do this, we also need to think like the bad guys, even if we move good.
The STEEM blockchain will always be vulnerable at its core, if you will ask me why, it is because the STEEM blockchain is held “whole”, all of the blockchains, inside the memories of the seed nodes. If one holds a very huge file in memory, then one can only hold so much. Even the very future of the STEEM SMT will be hinged on this Design.
We need to break up the blockchain, make it run on smaller pieces of blocks as part of the whole and not one-to-one (one-whole blockchian to one seed node). Instead of just one seed node holding all, let’s say a hundred now will hold all blocks to complete the number. If we can achieve this, then we can now “multiply” every module (every one seed among the one hundred) to no end because of these two reasons:
Surely the module server (one of the one hundred) will need a very minimal memory for it to function as one module effectively; a meager memory comes a new benefit, a LOWER CPU power
When #1 happens, then surely “anybody” can have the chance to host one, and yes, even at the homes where I certainly believe the best-minded hacker is still awaiting for us to arrive for his skills to be harnessed for the good
Before you even frown on items #1 and #2 above, let me ask you this: Who do you think are the seeds of the pesky and unstoppable TOR program? Maybe you still did not get me, PESKY and UNSTOPPABLE I say. Yes, the answer will be “ordinary” home-grade computers, one of which could have been our DDoS attacker.
In the movie PREDATOR starred by Schwarzenegger, he was the only one left to fight off the alien predator as the victor. Why victorious my friends? Because he acted and think like the nasty looking alien. The concept of a real peer-to-peer network is that every "user" will also be a "seed" as long as that PC is using that certain file. Applying this to the STEEMD service as an "always-a-user" and ever-growing filesystem, one can clearly see that if only we can make it real peer-to-peer then it can be made "un-DDOS-able" (for example as there are many kinds of attacks!).
We need to do the same guys. And in my next post I will detail the System, complete with a drawing for all of us to explore and improve upon, yes, even the very core techs of STEEM needs help in this area. The power of numbers again, a thousand always wins against ten, brains this time.
So to all our Systems guys here on STEEMIT, both on the inside and outside, please share your thoughts and ideas, we really need to poll our minds for the benefit of STEEM SMT's future.
Have you not even asked yourself as to why Ned (the CEO) encouraged each one to share his thoughts good or bad?