False calls on Hive Engine being down
This has been the case for the past few days where there is an assumption that Hive Engine itself is down. There have been situations in the past where the entire blockchain had gone down but the current issue is not related to the blockchain being down but to do with a few nodes. I thought I would write an article to clarify a few things about the current issue. I see many people talking about Hive Engine being down and not understanding the fact that the issue is not fully with Hive Engine but with a few nodes. https://enginerpc.com is one of the popular HA nodes run by Reazuliqbal. Many DApps are using this node for the internal failover facility the node has. In the last few days, this node is not working as expected. The URL is not a direct node but instead, it picks data from a few other HE nodes based on the availability. If even one of the nodes is malfunctioning, people either see failures or they see wrong data.
This doesn't mean that the Hive Engine is down. There are threads on INLEO where people are talking about Hive Engine being down. I understand that some of the public nodes have been overloaded in the last few days and going down frequently. My node was also affected but there are still working nodes not getting affected at all. It is also always possible to set up a private node and use that for their apps.
Hive Engine is a side chain on Hive and it is a blockchain built with the transactions broadcasted on Hive and signed by a group of witnesses who run nodes for Hive Engine. The main issue arose when hive-engine.com was not accessible or when it was throwing errors. Currently, there is no facility on hive-engine.com to switch nodes and use them. There are two official interfaces for Hive Engine. One is hive-engine.com and another is tribaldex.com. People have started using tribaldex.com where there is a facility to switch nodes. On hive-engine.com this facility is not available and it is also one of the most used user interfaces by people when it goes down people think that the entire blockchain is down.
To clarify again, Hive Engine is not down but some of the nodes are having issues. People can switch to an alternative node that is working. The status of working nodes can also be found on this site - https://beacon.peakd.com.
When api.hive.blog is down for a few days, we don't usually say that Hive itself is down and there are continuous issues with Hive. We switch to other nodes and keep using Hive. The current issue with Hive Engine is also something similar. It is not that the entire blockchain is down. It is just that some of the nodes are having issues and they also automatically heal. If some dApps are having concerns about using public nodes, they can use some private nodes for their needs. Already some of the games and dApps have been using private nodes or have their own public node.
Outstanding issues with Hive Engine
It will not be good if I complete this article without talking about the outstanding issues we have with Hive Engine. We have problems related to scalability and decentralization from Day 1. But with the facility we have on Hive Engine, people are very happy to onboard their projects on Hive Engine. It is also very cheap to run a project on Hive Engine. This creates a scalability issue when there are more records to query and the inbuilt API in the nodes is not efficient enough to fetch the necessary data.
The second biggest problem is decentralization. There is a big problem here because Hive Engine is mostly centralized and some of the key operations of Hive Engine are still controlled by them. One good thing about this is that the nodes are completely decentralized and open source and anybody can operate a node. Decentralization is not an easy thing on Hive and many people try to build smart contracts with decentralization but they fail and don't progress. We currently don't have any alternative to Hive Engine and that's one of the biggest reasons why this keeps going on and on.
Final note
I agree that we have so many outstanding issues that need to be sorted out with Hive Engine. But the current node issue we are having is not like the entire blockchain itself is down. That's how it is being projected and discussed. There can be scalability issues and trust issues on Hive Engine and that's definitely an important topic to discuss but the current issue is not related to that.
If you like what I'm doing on Hive, you can vote me as a witness with the links below.
Vote@balazas aHive Witness
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