In this short episode the Senior Blockchain Engineer at Steemit, @vandeberg, discusses the hardware scaling solution he architected called MIRA which is now undergoing a soft roll-out. MIRA leverages state-of-the-art database technology developed by Facebook to dramatically reduce the cost of running the Steem blockchain by allowing nodes to store almost all necessary data on low cost (commodity) hardware instead of in RAM without degrading performance. This is the scaling challenge that no one else is talking about because no other blockchain has applications with as much real-time engagement and traffic as Steem. Other high-performance blockchain protocols accomplish their speed by storing their blockchain database in RAM. RAM is incredibly expensive and unlike commodity-hardware, its price is not decreasing at an exponential rate. Thanks to MIRA, we will likely be able to reduce the amount of RAM being used in our Steem node by 50% and the nVME usage by 100%! Instead, we can switch entirely to generic network backed SSDs. This should reduce the costs of running a node to a *fraction* of what it used to be.