The Speed Of Hive

over 3 years ago

We all get anxious for things to change. This is part of the human condition it seems. Ultimately, we are all like kids waiting for Santa Claus to deliver out goodies. Many of us grew up with the excitement and anticipation of Christmas morning, where the presents would be, hopefully, plentiful.

We bring this same mindset to Hive. Unfortunately, we often wake up only to find that Santa Claus did not arrive. Under the tree is barren, providing extreme disappointment at first. Eventually, after enough mornings like that, it turns to anger. Finally, we are apathetic to the tree and whatever is around it. In fact, we do not even look anymore.

Such is the plight of broken promises and unfulfilled expectations.

Hive is about 9 months old. This is an important item to remember. However, we cannot overlook our legacy with Steem, since that is from where we were sprung. Thus, we are nearing 5 years since the first block was mined.

Sadly, we also have to embrace the bad as well as the good. Under the direction of Steemit Inc, we shall say that things, at best, were disappointing (at worst, truly tragic). Years were spent sending the community through the roller coaster of setting expectations and then never meeting them. After a while, we all became jaded kids. In addition to Christmas, we started to feel the same about birthdays. Nothing good was ever going to come.

This all leads up to a comment that was left by @blocktrades that looks to be relevant. While many bring the same mindset to Hive, there appears to be some changes taking place.

Here is what was written:

Actually, it looks like it is best to put that comment in context.

Here is what the reply pertained to:

Source

This is where there is a marked difference from the days of Steem. Part of the legacy that we have is all that wasted time. Thus, while we are nearing 5 years, from a development standpoint, we might only be entering into year 3.

The comment by Blocktrades exemplifies, to a degree, how different things are now. By using advanced mathematical skills, we see there are 14 people now working on Hived and Hivemind whereas before, there were 4. This is 3.5 times the number.

Of course, nothing operates in a linear fashion so it might be unfair to say this team is going to be 3.5 times faster simply based upon the number of people. However, when experience, focus, and motivation are factored in, there will certainly be some type of increase in the pace of things being completed.

This also might not factor in other developers who are assisting in different aspects of blockchain coding outside of Blocktrades group.

We see a lot of discussion about the DAO and how effective it is. These are worthy conversations since many of the accusations are evident. However, one thing we have to keep in mind, when it comes to blockchain development, Steemit Inc was dumping 800K per month onto the open market to pay for the results that we are now dealing with.

Any rational cost/benefit analysis tells us that was likely a bad return for the community.

Source

This is an area that is necessary for targeting and it is good to see focus being paid to it. Ultimately, the success of any technology-based cryptocurrency, like HIVE, is going to depend upon what is built on the blockchain. As we know, users comes for the games and applications.

It is also an area that seems to be lagging. According to the latest post put out by Blocktrades, there are some issues that applications need to deal with. Issues usually means time delays and added expense for development, two things we want to reduce.

Enter a lightweight framework for the second layer.

Here is how it was explained:

To address, the above issues, we plan to create a lightweight framework using much of the technology stack of hivemind, combined with the new hived plugin we’re developing that will simplify real-time reception and processing of blockchain data and support easy fork-handling via a generic undo mechanism.

However, unlike in a traditional hivemind installation, the operator of a 2nd layer node of this type will get to decide what data he wants to store and what APIs he wants to support. For example, a 2nd layer node that supports a game might initially only track account balances and game history, but no social media data. But if the node operator later wants to add more data and API support to their 2nd layer node, we want to make it easy to add it via some form of upgrade mechanism. I believe it was @howo that coined the term “modular hivemind” to refer to this idea.

Source

Even to a non-techie, this concept makes a great deal of sense. Why should an application need to pull all the data if most of it is not relevant? That only slows things down while tying up resources. Overloaded nodes tend to fail, as we experienced post HF24 since it was a round robin as to which nodes were operational, which only added more load.

The challenge with this, from a community standpoint, is the lack of attention that we place upon it. Simply put, it is not something we notice. How many of us are really aware of how much data a node is pulling? Almost the entire user base could, quite frankly, care less, at least until something breaks.

Nevertheless, this is vital to the future performance of the ecosystem.

Ultimately, the speed of Hive appears to be increasing. We are aware that the development of many second layer applications is picking up, at least with a few of the games and tribes. From what we can conclude from the initial comment cited, it looks like we can expect more rapid development at the infrastructure level.

Why is this all important? Because the tendency is for us to keep expressing our disappointment each morning. That said, it does appear that Santa might be on his way.

Another way of stating it is the Grinch is no longer a part of Hive.

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