We guessed something was up yesterday on Musing. just didn't know it would be that sudden. Huge votes were given out and it wasn't normal.I think they knew already or had been warned.
Personally I welcome this as it forces us to get our act together and move forward properly.
The migration over to RocksDB would allow RPC nodes (nodes that allow for remote procedure calls you can use to transact with the blockchain) to be run more cheaply. If STEEM gets really cheap, no money to run the full nodes would be the death of Steem. We know that Steem can survive a STEEM price of $0.07. If I knew the last full node weren't about to go offline any time soon, I'd buy a lot more at or slightly below that price point.
The chain is a lot bigger now than when STEEM last traded at $0.07. However, I do believe that full nodes can be run for a lot less money than Steemit spends on them and even if they do shut down their nodes that some of the third party apps with their own nodes would keep running (and indeed even so if their usage increased a lot). That is just my opinion though and may be wrong.
I didn't know all of that info. Thanks Markku,why don't you do a post along these lines for the ones that aren't aware.Understanding all the implications is very important.
That has been much better explained in the Blocktrades' proposal to implementit on behalf of Steemit Inc to Steemit Inc, for example.
https://steemit.com/blocktrades/@blocktrades/blocktrades-rocksdb-proposal-to-steemit