I 100% agree with you on this, and it is exactly the sort of response we needed from a Witness. The Steem blockchain has 150 active witnesses supporting it, there are a number of independent Nodes being run - and I am quite sure throughout the existing community if needed any lost nodes would be replaced - certainly running a node myself is on a list of my own future commitments to the blockchain.
I'm not concerned about this update from Steemit Inc because I believe the blockchain has more then enough people outside of it to keep everything running - it's unfortunate that the current cryptocurrency price crash (thanks to Bitcoin Cash predominately) has brought this situation to a head - but I am also sure that any of the laid off work force that truly believe in the Steem Blockchain will continue to support it one way or another.
@ura-soul you have always impressed me as Witness for being technically prolific, extremely thorough and putting in a large amount of work to promote the Steem Blockchain and onboard users. I hope anyone that does not already support your Witness considers doing it now.
I agree @ura-soul his role as a Witness really seriously and delivers great content as well. I really appreciated it, good job!
Thanks for your kind words and support! We really need to see the figures involved regarding traffic and load hitting the Steemit inc. nodes - I don't personally have that data but it is claimed to be high enough to warrant pretty high annual costs. I can tell you that my site steemocean.com is logging around 60,000 active voters on the blockchain and also that blocktivity.info lists steem as only using a tiny percentage of it's capacity (though this is not accurate enough to base serious calculations on). We really need more real data to go on to attempt to solve this in the community, but generally this type of data is not released by Steemit inc... so.. they don't do themselves many favours in that regard.
I still think that the crypto prices are going to recover before the end of the year - at least to a point where this crisis might be less of a concern. We shall see! In the meantime I'm polishing my harmonica to get back to my day job of busking on roundabouts :)
Strength in numbers, let's start ramping activity and productivity up again on STEEM. peace