Things look bad, really bad.
After reviewing steem seed nodes list, which many of us use in their config.ini, I found that 12 nodes were not working at all. That is 36% of all the nodes on the list.
Hard fork 16 and its economic changes cut the rewards for active witnesses to a significant extent, but the role of a witness was never meant to be a free money making machine.
"To Protect and to Serve", right?
As a witness, I am running a public seed node at: gtg.steem.house:2001.
Also I am running a few other steemd instances for my own needs, which as a side effect, serve the p2p role for the steem network.
That is currently one of the 21 publicly listed AND available seed nodes.
We need a lot more than that.
I am ok with witnesses running their useful services such as web tools, APIs, or exchanges, which requires them to allocate a lot more resources (full nodes). What about others?
With current prices, a runner up witness who generates 6-7 blocks a day for a month is able to cover his hardware expenses related to both the witness node and the seed node. Currently, ~2% of network approval is needed for that, which is equivalent to being within top 60.
So why do we have only 20 nodes on the list?
I hope that some nodes were temporarily unavailable because they were being upgraded to v0.16.1
Soon I am going to replace seednodes.txt with an updated list of working nodes. If you want to add or update your node, please leave a comment or make a pull request to my forked branch (for later, single, consolidated pull request to the steemit repository)
Please, add your node only if you have a fast (preferably at least 100Mbps upstream), low latency network connection.
I am going to update the list periodically.