I might be doing a video to help explain just an quick overview of all the major changes happening with steem, do you think Mira and the new condenser news along with RocksDB and Hivem,mnd and hoping to put Full Nodes on regular 4gb Servers, do you think that is a good start for the system upgrades? I also plan to go over Worker proposals,  Steemit Ads, and a few other things

Very impressive work so far on cost reduction. We all benefit from this in the end.
The test of a company, community or ecosystem is how it performs in times of crisis and Steem and Steemit have performed admirably where it counts.

WOW... deep Thx for that   🤞✌

This is a great announcement and I hate to be "that guy" who comes in and takes a dump on the good vibes, but what about Smart Media Tokens?

I know, SMT's were scaled back and we are going to be getting SMT-lite while other features come later, but the silence is deafening. I also recall RocksDB being important to the launch of SMT's and now that RocksDB appears to be going well, how about SMT's?

In the interim, @yabapmatt @aggroed and @harpagon have launched an impressive side-chain called Steem Engine and while it is only basic for now, it gives us SMT like functionality on Steem right now.

The Steem community has always impressed me, but of late, even more so and it feels like they have been picking up the slack a little bit. We have all been feeling the pinch of this bear market, but still.

The increased transparency and communication lately has also been welcomed and appreciated, I can see STINC is making more of an effort now, but the silence about the pending mainnet launch in a month concerns me.

> not we should utilize “reserved instances” which could deliver additional cost reductions in the range of 20-35% with respect to total EC2 spending.

Reserve instances is a good idea. I am actually surprised that we are not using reserved instances yet.

Any report on the SMTs ?

With a bit of effort, the "social" aspects of Steem can still save themselves and grow, I believe. 

And it *matters,* because whereas it's lovely to market Steem as *"a great place to develop dapps,"* it's even *better* to market Steem as "a great place to develop dapps" *that also happens to have a huge and thriving built-in user base.*

If you were concerned about cost why would you be using the MOST EXPENSIVE hosting  service? :D Don't you think it would be cheaper to simply have the community deploy RPCs? Sunset steemit.com's centralized bullshit? Make truely decentralized apps? OR just waste your money on users who give you jack shit. I guess steemit.com wants that control over it's users just like facebook. As they already openly lied and censored user accounts , (even worse than YouTube or FB, they tell you when users are censored on the front ends)

Satoshi told us about this problem 9 frigging years ago. Remember the guy who inspired Ned and Dan's code? He is gone but his insight remains.
'![Screenshot_2019-02-12_11-43-14.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmdht19vdJB1g6azFQz33FowTgGQP8pi58wtiLTxobJAVj/Screenshot_2019-02-12_11-43-14.png)

Good work. The community will always support this development.

Posted using [Partiko iOS](https://steemit.com/@partiko-ios)

Sounds very complicated way above my understanding level of how websites/blockchain work. Keep up the good work and hopefully price rises in the future can justify the work you are doing as well as whatever steemit is able to pay you.

Why not investigating another cheaper cloud hosting like Vultr instead of AWS?

Add more features to the social side of the condenser, analytics is one of the key features missing in the app.

Posted using [Partiko Android](https://steemit.com/@partiko-android)

Well done.

Looks like you are on good track. The community is very happy to see that and hear from you with the regular updates. Keep up the good work!

So great progress. Sounds really good to read that. Let's go forward. ;D

You guys did a great job by removing our views, so that we authors have no more a clue about how many people watch our posts. Why not continue this philosophy on the images? You already made a step in the right direction by reducing image quality to 1% of the original, but why not go the whole way? By completely removing images you would save even more costs!
I already use https://postimages.org/ when I want to present high quality images to the 2 or 3 voters that come by my posts. It's completely free. And you don't have to power up. So for authors with small accounts with little RC, this would be a nice solution. 
Just my 5 steems.

Just fyi don't confuse with https://www.imagepost.com/

And don't click on this last link...

![1486484443_pig.gif](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbkhd6CG4qWUCe5xgZrRuabGB219jMVsfuSyQxgvJfwy9/1486484443_pig.gif)

You did? I warned you!

Another great update!
Oh yeah!

https://media.giphy.com/media/YVoVTVZVhaVQA/giphy.gif

Regarding Wallet separation: please add some information and links about Steem wallets on steem.com, because this important information is still missing on the website. Users and investors would like to know how to save, transfer and stake Steem, when they visit Steem.com.