I've been a witness for five months now, and it's been one hell of a ride. Given that I'm approaching my six month mark, I thought I'd make a new witness statement.
Who I Am
My name is Andrei Chira. I'm a writer in fiction and non-fiction, a former 82nd Airborne paratrooper, and the father of the most awesome little girls on the planet. I've been on Steemit since August of 2016. I joined mainly for political reasons, as Steemit is a platform where censorship doesn't exist (even when flagging is involved). No central authority can ban you or force you off the platform, and there's more than one way to access the blockchain. The more time I spent here, though, the more incredible people I met, and I've stayed for the amazing community I've found here. I came here as a cryptocurrency newbie, and, thanks to the enormous wealth of information and good people willing to teach, I think I've got a solid handle on how this works. Of course, I'm still learning, but that's half the fun!
Witness Server Configuration
At the moment, I am running a primary witness node and a secondary witness node that serves as a back-up. Both operate the same configuration:
- 32GB DDR3 ECC RAM
- 2x2TB hard drives
- Intel Xeon E3 quad-core CPU
- 20TB available bandwidth
I'm also running 
Witness Contributions
Unlike many of the top 20 witnesses, I'm not a developer or coder (though I'd like to be). As it stands, I'm attending law school, and that takes up the time I could otherwise use to learn how to code. That being said, I do my best to contribute in other ways. Currently, I produce The Fictioneers' and The State of the Witness podcasts. The first focuses around the writing activities and writing advice that I and others on The Writers' Block provide to aspiring authors. The second is a podcast that I and 
I'm also a moderator on The Writers' Block, which is where my second project is primarily focused on. Given that I'm studying the law and that's where my developmental strength is, I, along with help from 
My Thoughts on the Future of Steemit
With Hardfork 20 coming up relatively soon, user intake will be streamlined and the number of users will no doubt increase dramatically. Given the issues that so many users last year had with trying to get signed up in a timely fashion, this can't come soon enough. However, there are two things that I think will have a more significant impact on Steemit: communities, and Smart Media Tokens (SMTs).
First, communities will help organize users into groups that are more aligned on lines of interest. One of the less-than-stellar things about Steemit is that, as of now, all default feeds pull from every kind of tag. Once can pare that down manually, but it will improve user engagement in curating content when users can group together along specific interest lines and limit what they see to those interests. There's already a staggering amount of content; organizing it into easier-to-digest forms should dramatically improve user engagement.
Second, SMTs are going to revolutionize how we interact with the blockchain. Much has been made about them across Steemit, so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here. However, I will say that different groups being able to set up their own tokens and trade those tokens around will encourage interest-specific investment. As 
I'm looking forward to the implementation of both more than anything else. I think they will dramatically change the way we interact with the blockchain in a very positive way.
If you want to vote for me as a witness, cast your vote here! Scroll down until you see this text box and type in my name.
