American politicians have the saying:

It's the economy, stupid!

As a politician you're going to be judged by the economy and economic performance during your time in office.

What makes investing in a network like Blurt or a network like Cosmos or a network like Akash or VSYS scary?

In my opinion, it is the overall low level of resiliency.

I think I've been quite upfront that of course I don't view Blurt as a competitor to Bitcoin in any way shape or form. it's quite delusional to think otherwise. This thing, is not that thing.

but I think it's also quite apparent that there is real value here in the land of fast proof of stake blockchains.

What do fast POS chains do well?

• Anti censorship
• Application development platform
• Globally accessible back end where every user is the root user
• Community
• Governance

Those are great strengths to have, and I am firmly convinced that this is powerful software. But we're really lacking in nodes. Have a look at the witnesses tab, I think we have about 50 at any given time.

Okay so what is that? That is 50 nodes that are in line to participate in consensus with the top 20 participating in consensus actively.

Now let's do Bitcoin:

https://bitnodes.io/ reports that there are over 11,000 reachable Bitcoin full nodes in the world. Please realize that there are many more unreachable no just that are sitting maybe behind NAT or maybe are using some sort of a privacy layer, or maybe are not running the Bitcoin core software, which is the only software that the bit nodes website tracks.

https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/historical.html shows more like 45,000 or 50,000 nodes currently. It's challenging to say which one is correct.

Folks for fast proof of stake to prosper, we need to change the network topology. Currently, blurt is more or less centralized.

I think we've done really well in decentralizing. There is a wide range of front end interfaces available, and also several public RPC interfaces.

But I can assure you that it is not enough.

For anyone to really be able to trust blurt as money, We need a thousand nodes, and at least 200 standby witnesses.

Consensus must never stop. This is really really critical, so that's why I have been grinding away on the raspberry pi.

It helps of course that I have been developing Pi images and a pi image generation system for Tendermint's Starport. In fact, my recent success in building an image for blurt comes directly out of SOS, which was in fact purpose built for Starport. SOS is more or less my ideal embedded operating system.

Oh and by the way, I just happen to be running a VSYS node alongside Blurt on my Pi.

The sync time seems to leave a lot to be desired but it most certainly does run.

Overtime, the image will be extended to include participation in a paid IPFS collaborative cluster, or even clusters.

Currently, users do not pay to host high quality photos on blurt. This is a problem, because the photos are not stored on the blockchain. In fact, they're stored on an S3 bucket that has run either on scale way, or on one of the machines that I maintain in Germany. Basically, image hosting is subsidized. (The bill, btw is $2/mo on scaleway and $90/mo on hetzner. Not a big deal really)

Subsidies will kill us. Looking at the big picture, we need to get blurt to a place where I can walk outside, hop on my motorcycle, go for a motorcycle ride, get hit by a bus, perish, and absolutely nothing changes except you will no longer get long winded technical screeds like this one on how to improve network resiliency.

What characteristics will build resiliency?

• High node count -- ideally 10,000+
• High number of witness candidates -- ideally 1,000+
• Fixes to failure of consensus witnesses -- Right now we can lose only five consensus witnesses without the chain going down. That is bad and we must fix it.
• Low network chatter
• Lack of dependency on public RPC endpoints
• community participation in infrastructure development

Result

• High price - this purchases more and better infrastructure

To be clear, I don't want this only for blurt. I think that delegated proof of stake, or fast proof of stake block chains have a great deal to offer the world in terms of transparent, accountable governance. POS isn't democracy, that's why it works well. Those with the most skin in the game have the most say in governance matters and this is right and good.

thank you

Thank you for two things, thank you for reading my article, and thank you for using blurt.