i think the size of the steemit blockchain right about now is somewhere in the order of about 200gb (at least I'm assuming that to be the case) based on the fact that just 5 months ago this post indicating that the size was 43 GB in September 2017 and i seem to remember seeing that it had swelled massively over the last six months with witnesses upgrading storage and memory and ssd raids etc.
i asked permission from @GadgetsBoy on twitter to use his picture that he posted this morning of the new sandisk extreme 400gb -- can you believe that 400gb?!
can you believe that you can get a 400gb micro sd drive now?
The SanDisk Ultra 400GB microSDXC Memory Card + SD Adapter with A1 App Performance up to 100MB/s, Class 10, U1 is yours for the quite low price (when you think about it) for £200 here in the uk and i'm sure that price is going to drop over time.
It got me thinking thou (and before anyone jumps in about reliability of sd cards, yes i know, thank you) about how small you could go for maybe building some kind of raided raspberry pi 3 unit or some kind of micro computer with these as copies of the steemit blockchain that you could easily build and deploy and become a witness -- or maybe build and send people so they could then get them put into colocation spaces around the world.
i effectively could buy just the one and store a complete copy of the steemit blockchain on it, something to think about, i wonder how many phones could accept a 400 gb card, wonder if you could have a global network of smart phones dedicated to being a 'witness in your pocket' just providing some kind of p2p (person to person) in this case local STUN like type of local node setup -- of course i'm just spitballing here but it's something to think about.
I might get one just to store the complete steemit blockchain on as it is today.
ps. i realise a raspberry pi is not fast enough probably to be a witness and that it's only got 100mb ethernet at max on it and would probably burn a whole in the floor doing it -- let's hope steemd multithreaded comes out then and we can start to experiment on the smallest node to serve a steemit blockchain on! that would be neat.
