One week into being a witness for Steemit
About a week has gone by as being a witness and so far everything has been running smoothly. My servers are stable and everything has been working as it should. I missed my very first block due to mixing up the keys for my two nodes, a classic bummer and lesson learned of it 😎
So far I've been witnessing about 12 blocks per day, much thanks to some really big support from all of you in the community of Steemit! A big thanks to everyone voting for me, trusting me with this task. 😍
I've managed to write some good quality content on Steemit during the week, including
- [ELI5] Gridcoin Research and BOINC Explained
- Great traction for Gridcoin the past weeks; We're overwelmed but solution is just around the corner!
- Gridcoin Science: FightAIDS@Home - Finding a cure, one protein at the time
Go DEX!
I've also been pounding heavily for the OpenLedger DEX. An open decentralized exchange based on the #bitshares and Graphine blockchain system, just like Steemit. You should never keep to much, or any coins for that matter, on a centralized exchange. Something many users have come to fear during the past few days. I do hope everything works out for the in the end.
If you are interested in #bitshares, graphine and the Open DEX systems you should join 
Backup Witness Node operational
I wish to make sure that I can support the Steemit community with a quality service back to it, and that's why I pretty quick decided to set up a second witness node that can take over in case of a failure of the main node. This node will take over in case the main witness node misses 2 blocks, making sure there are as little interruption as possible due to any errors.
Security
My setup consists of three nodes for the moment.
- Node 1 is my Main witness node.
- Node 2 is my Backup witness node.
- Node 3 will be my public WSS node.
Node 1 + 2 is running on a 6-core 24GB Ram 100% SSD System, while Node 3 is running on a 10-core 50GB Ram 100% SSD System
Node 1 and 2 is not accessible from the outside and only Node 3 can access these nodes. They all have different passwords and root login access disabled. All to make sure the security is at least somewhat high on the tings that I can decide over.
These nodes will also be running the blockexplorer for the Gridcoin community, Gridcoinstats, that has grown out of it's to small server it once started on.
Future ideas
Another goal will be to set up a public WSS node for anyone to use, hence the high specs of Node 3, making the Steemit network less centralized. There are others running these already, but I do think there would be an asset to set more of these up. I will need to look more into the details of getting it running properly.
Gridcoin Supporter
I'm a heavy fan of the Gridcoin Research coin and I wish to find good ways to support it. By being a witness I'm gaining some good Steem Power that I can use for curating good quality posts and new users that posts in the #gridcoin tag here on Steemit. Another task that I can use the reward for being a witness is to sporadically do rain on various projects of the network as well as refilling our very popular faucet.
Maybe even be able to support proper bounties for developing our software. Only the sky is the limit on Steemit and the Cryptocurrency space.
Interested in learning more about Gridcoin?
Read more in the #gridcoin tag, keep an eye out for the Gridcoin Hangout posts by 
Thanks for your support!
Vote 
for witness on Steemit.com
Proud Supporter of the Cryptocurrency Gridcoin
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