Occasionally people ask me what are the changes happening (if any) in the Steem blockchain code. One example is the below discussion.
As a Steem Witness, I feel obliged to explain my limited (& may be wrong) deductions based on the code changes to the community. This is an attempt along the lines.
The discussion which prompted me to think in this direction is shared below.
@surpassingoogle was discussing about @teardrops SMT & a part of the discussion below.
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surpassingoogle:
it (@teardrops) will e used across all three interfaces
very powerful
bobinson Last Thursday at 6:42 PM:
it can be ...
It will take some 6 months I think
surpassinggoogle Last Thursday at 6:42 PM:
i mean being able to build a blockchain
smt?
bobinsonLast Thursday at 6:44 PM:
yes
surpassinggoogleLast Thursday at 6:44 PM:
the whole version or lite?
bobinsonLast Thursday at 6:45 PM:
whole version
right now they are doing the work for RocksDB integration
surpassinggoogleLast Thursday at 6:45 PM:
is that still going to be built?
i mean the whole version
how long do you think more before rockdb based on the progress you monitor
bobinsonLast Thursday at 6:49 PM
By Feb end
surpassinggoogleLast Thursday at 6:49 PM
oh awesome
but how about smt lite, will that come out first?
or have they decided to go for the full version instead?
bobinsonLast Thursday at 6:50 PM
I am not sure about the smt-lite. Confused now .. if I am able to recollect I will update
RocksDB will come first for sure
In a nutshell, the questions and doubts which everyone asked were the following
1. What is the current work being done on the Steem blockchain ?
From my limited observations and the automatic inspection (CI - CD) I have setup, the recent changes are all towards RocksDB integration. Essentially we have to "connect" the blockchain to a database called RocksDB.
The arrows from left to right can be thought of the pipes connecting the blockchain. Its going to carry the content that is not required for the house keeping of the blockchain to a long term warehouse. The RocksDB database is such a long term warehouse which can store large amount of "things". Mira can be seen as the pipes and as of now, we are doing the plumbing to transport over flowing items from the blockchain to the warehouse. Looking at the speed of commits at the Github were the work is done, a wild guess is that the work will be completed by Feb end 2019.
RocksDB as explained by @blocktrades and also by steemit / @ned is a great addition to the long term sustainability of the blockchain. Such a mechanism is useful for any blockchain and this work is need of the time. In my personal opinion, even without the cost cutting measures this is indeed very much needed.
This work is going to take time & even the "Sword fish trick" is not going to speed up & patience is needed. If someone things this can be done faster, they are missing the "girl in the red" just like in the hottest hacking/cracking scene screenshot shown below.
(The uninitiated are welcome to watch the hottest hack seen here : 
2. SMT / SMT-lite
Well, Atleast from the repository I am not able to see much happening in that direction. If this deduction is wrong, whomsoever knows more, feel free to correct me.
3. MacOS support
As I had written earlier, it was not easy to build the Steem source code in macOS due to missing few dependencies (zlib, bzip2) and a major tool (boost 1.60.0. C++ library to be precise)
4. Memory handling bugs were fixed.
The Steem source code had few bugs which could have been exploited (though very difficult ) & this major security fix also was pushed in the December time frame.
Summary
In general, there is quite a lot of work happening in the blockchain side. Irrespective of the bearish market or anything else, this is indeed a good development. Personally, these developments are much more valuable than the Etherium hard forks happening under various names.
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