Thanks, this post is very helpful.
HOWEVER, what I am missing here, is how transactions on the blockchain are handled, who handles them and how many nodes are involved in keeping the blockchain online in the world at any given time. (Node list online? I see Seed Nodes, but not sure if that's just the top few nodes)
I see articles that say 25,000 ETH nodes are active, compared to BTC 7000+ and I wonder, how does that compare with STEEM and how will that look in the future, assuming Fabric is launched, etc.
Hi,
I'm really happy to get such a good guidline from your post.Thank you
Transactions from Steemit are signed by the browser locally, sent to Steemit's servers, forwarded to their node, and then are broadcast to the peers their nodes are connected to. Each Steem node (seed nodes, witness nodes, API nodes, any node) is broadcasting the transactions it sees and also sharing node addresses with other nodes. The witness nodes get the transactions, verify they are legitimate (like other nodes have checked), and include them into a block when the account they are configured to generate from are scheduled to generate a block.
As for node count, I don't know. If I had to guess I'd say at least 100. More is obviously better and more robust.
So in a nutshell, Witnesses are like Bitcoin miners but are elected and seem to have more responsibility.
Did I get this right? :)