Last week we had the second edition of this series. As stated, the goal is to inform the community on what the people who are the backbone of Steemit are doing, to glorify the good actors and to expose the not so good.
What are Witnesses?
Last time there was some confusion regarding what witnesses are. For those who do not know, here is a short explanation. For those who already know, jump ahead to the update.
Steem currently has 19 witnesses that validate the transactions of the network (you can see them here) and they get compensated for every block of transaction they validate. It's a very important job and it is literally the backbone of the steem blockchain (the technology that powers Steemit.com).
Witnesses have to run and maintain steem servers, update them, and provide reliable price feeds for the Steem Dollars. Witnesses are voted into position and can also get paid to provide services that benefit the steem platform, such as code review, documentation, developing new services, or helping out in the community.
A witness node in the top 19 get paid a fixed amount of about 1 blocks a minute or 1371.42 blocks/day assuming no misses. Payments are ~1430 steem per day (paid in VEST aka SP). At $2 per steem that's about $2860 per day each. However, when it comes to salary the following was brought forth in the comment in the first edition and it's important for everyone to take this into consideration:
The payout of Witness is more akin to stock options than a salary or fee for service, because it is tied to the future value of Steem and can't be cashed out (more than 1% per week). This is a good thing because it means the interests of witnesses are aligned with the interests of Steem in terms of long term value (and increasingly so as witnesses are more vested). However, it does mean that you can't reasonably say to witnesses, "You are being paid all this money, so you better go and spend it every week" because no one is receiving that in actual, spendable, payments. Expecting strong qualifications, competence, engagement, attention and effective representation are entirely reasonable expectations however. There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty as to how much they will truly profit in $USD.
Witness Update
- I am upgrading the server to fix node crashing issues.
- I added max block size column to witness page.
- I wrote a reputation debugging report https://steemd.com/rep
- I did performance optimizations for account pages.
https://steemit.com/steem/@pharesim/bounty-for-completion-of-native-javascript-steem-signer
I am still hammering out issues with the chat server. Guess the update there is we've ramped up server horsepower to address lag and are reaching out to Rocketchat Devs to discuss client side performance issues and I've also started to assemble a team of admins and moderators.
Also: https://steemit.com/steemit/@kennyrowe/steemit-meetup-in-seattle-with-riverhead-james-reidy But that's in a couple weeks - mostly just prep work now.
No updates, just continuing to do the same things I reported on last time.
I should start divesting on Monday, the week after I will start distributing some Rewards to contributors.
While I started contributing to the steemit.com repo before it went open-source, I was still on vacation (in a sailboat) during that time so my contributions were limited. Now that I'm back home I've started really diving into the code and fixing and changing stuff. I've been trying to focus on some of the little things that the dev team haven't had time to focus on yet, but there are several things you may have noticed that were implemented by me over the last few weeks. Among these are the curation and author rewards pages on your profile page, the hidden "low-quality" votes (that James expanded on using the reputation system), and in the next update you'll see a revamped Profile page that includes some ideas from
's awesome design post on steemit.com. The curation rewards will also include links to the user that made the post you got a reward for.
For now the profile page only has a fixed background, but in the near future I will add the ability to set a background picture similar to Facebook's banner; and maybe a short description you can include to let people know what your blog is about or what you're interested in.
This past week, I continued working on the dead man switch / will design. I have also been going through the recently open sourced steemit.com code and getting familiar with it.
Unfortunately, not much [to update on]... It was my last week at work, had to finish a lot of stuff and then was travelling for holidays 😃 there were a few emergencies for muse and bts, but that's not strictly steem related. Especially given that it's a bug in graphene that was fixed in steem but not backported yet, so it came back to bite us really hard (fortunately
was here and we managed to "fix" bts with the help of a couple of other witnesses).
I've been working with non-english speakers on posts of stories, trying to gather more support for authors / fiction writers, and have started reviewing the latest code for both steem and steemit, not to mention working closely with my developer on steemgrants, steemscholarships, and steemwriters. I've also been in contact with some community members who have some ideas that we aren't quite ready to share
- While continuing to analyze performance of the Steem network code, we made a small optimization to peer-to-peer operation. We found a case where a node could request a block after it had already received it from a peer due to a race condition. We're also investigating the possibility of improving the forking logic for Steem.
- Completed changes to BitShares wallet GUI to support Steem Dollars and to allow sending of memos when withdrawing Steem and Steem Dolllars. Among other things, this allows users to directly withdraw OPEN.STEEM to other exchanges without having to first send to their Steem wallet.
- Re-arranged containers and VMs for BlockTrades and OpenLedger to spread out the computational load so as to reduce the chance for failures when sending funds.
- Continued to assist new users learning how to work with cryptocurrencies and the Steem wallet.
Aggregating content providers for the platform that will enrich and diversify what we see today and maintaining/upgrading my servers to support my witness. I have another project that still requires some vetting to ensure it is a suitable direction for the platform. Hoping to be able to discuss more about this soon.
In this week most of my time is spent on communications in Chinese community. Some time on fighting spam. A little time on code view.
I will be travelling in next 3 weeks, so probably less activities.
I just got back from the lawyers office. Corporation should be ready in a few weeks pending no hangups in processing... SBD cards one step closer.
I will have to repost my suggestion to send Steemit representatives to the CM2106, and see if we can get enough support to fund that. If not I will adjust my plans accordingly.
From last week:
*Spreading words to Korean community in a public chatroom (with over 150 people)
*Updated and running Noteefi (Telegram notification bot)
*Planning to introduce Steemit to snulife (a community of Seoul National University, which is the best university in Korea and accessible only students and alumni)
*Preparing Steem development contest
This week:
Maintaining a high quality witness server and seed node
Running Noteefi
Initialized a discussion about developing alternative GUI for Korean community: Link
Helped Korean whitepaper translation: Link
Recruiting writers with qualities: Link
In addition to the usual updates and upgrades to witness and seed nodes. I have discussed with
possible ways to help out with the billboards initiative. As part of the initiative I will be working on a billboard campaign here in Connecticut. In addition we will be looking into ways which witness funding could be used to benefit the project. Outside of these activities, I am an active curator and I try to target undervoted and topically diverse posts. In the past few days I was voted into the list of active witnesses and as such I will continue looking for more ways in which my skills and resources can be used to benefit our community.
Released Windows Wallet and Miner for v0.12.2
Major revamp on Sharebits to first make it work (Goal is to enhance it to support Steem)
Fixed Sharebits's Invalid Objects and Invalid Assets bugs
I have also updated the witness excel sheet.
I've hired a curator team. I have 10 people paid to look for the best hidden gems and other quality posts to help develop the site content. if you have any questions about how that works I'd be happy to answer. It is something new I came up with myself and have been running for over a week now, with great results
Follow-up interview with 
I was curious to understand how Smooth pays curators to find hidden gems:
How do you determine what are hidden gems?
High quality posts that are not already in Trending. They can be before payout or after payout (after payout I get no curation reward but I still upvote to support quality content on the platform)
Do the curators have any guidelines?
Yes there are guidelines but they aren't public
How much are curators getting paid?
Pay is not public but is enough that I have an increasingly long waiting list for positions. All are being paid the same.
How can other whales help out?
I'd prefer that other whales do their own thing. One of the problems we've had is too much group voting. There is still plenty of content to be found. Even with 10 curators each sending me links I getting few duplicates.
Are there any open positions?
There are no open positions, all 10 slots are currently filled or in the process of being filled, but there is a waiting list.
Interesting! We'll see how that works out. You can contact
Missing Updates:
It doesn't mean that they aren't doing anything but somehow they haven't felt it was important to give an update to the community.
Witness Proposals
Read his witness proposal here: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@aizensou/witness-application-aizensou
Read his witness proposal here: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@glitterpig/witness-glitterpig-because-everything-is-better-with-a-bit-of-bling
Read his witness proposal here: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@gtg/witness-gtg
Comments
Those responses were gathered by 
Nevertheless, if you read through the update you can see that many of them are doing great work, particularly back-end work. Those changes may not be apparent for most people but they are fundamental to the long term viability of the platform. We have also seen quite a few witnesses focus on curation recently, which hopefully will help promote great content on the platform.
Vote with your conscience
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Does some of the update above inspire confidence and competence to you? Please vote for them. Since it's still only the second real update, I would ask you not to be too harsh. We will increase the pressure for detailed updates as time goes on. We will demand competence and RESULTS from our witness to ensure the best long term success of this platform.