Vote for Shmoogle Osukami's witness!
updated: 10/09/2025
Who?
I'm Shmoogle Osukami, Otherwise known as Ben.
I'm a British guy who unsurprisingly lives in England. I'm a rather knowledgeable tech guy who dabbles in coding, web design and development, gaming and game making and a variety of other hobbies.
I regularly check up on the latest developments happening at the core of hive and related software, offering feedback and the occasional bug report. I like to think I've fairly knowledgeable on the functions of hive.
Most of my time currently is spent being a content creator on twitch.tv, Streaming 3 times a week.
The rest is divided up into doing 3D modelling, fiddling with bits of code, among other things.
Why?
I run my witness on my own hardware in my own home. Very few witnesses do this, Some opt for big datacentre hosts, most opt to run on Privex using Hive-In-A-Box.
While there isn't much of an issue hosting nodes with big datacentre companies and the likes, it can sometime lead to a centralization of node locations.
Running everything at home provides the most decentralise means of hosting a node that you can get and that is primarily what's at offer.
An independently run node, running outside of centralized datacentres.
I've been a witness for over 3 years now and withing those 3 years I've missed only 15 blocks (as of writing this)
My witness has been very reliable and I have infrastructure in place to disable the witness in the event of unexpected failures.
I also manage 4 other witnesses, 
As of Q2 2025 the number of witnesses I manage has reduced to my own and
What you running though?
My Hive witness node runs on my home server.
It consists of the following:
- CPU: Xeon E5-2690 v2 x2 (2 Sockets)
- Ram: 256GB ECC DDR3
- MOBO: ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS
- Storage:
- x4 4TB NVMEs in a Asus Hyper m.2 Expansion card configured as a 16TB raid pool
- x2 4TB Samsung evo SSDs configured in a 8TB raid pool
- 14TB Mechanical Enterprise HDD
- 1TB Crucial SSD as primary boot drive and misc storage.
- Network(internet): 1GB/s down 100MB/s Up
This is running on a 2000VA Powercool UPS Battery backup, which the network and internet routers are also plugged into.
Witness Parameters (Interest, Account cost, etc)
While I'm no economist, I personally believe that a HBD interest ranged between 10-12% is sufficient at the time of writing this post.
I generally believe that HBD interest should always outpace fiat savings interest rates at the very least, while also competing with crypto interest yields where it is safe and possible to do so.
I also believe that HBD interest should not exceed that of the APR that can be gained from HP APR and curation APR which generally runs around 12-14% depending on performance. This is in order to make sure HBD doesn't become the primary currency for returns as that is what HIVE/HIVEPOWER is for.
Account creation prices I generally hold at 3 HIVE, there is little incentive to change this at this point and buying a hive account for 3 HIVE is still very very cheap.
Also.. A full API node.
In the past I have run a Full API node, due to costs and where I'm currently ranked and the fact there are many very solid API node available already I'm not planning on running one at this time.
Misc info
My node is also a SEED Node, which basically means it's on the list of the first nodes new witnesses connect to when they start up their witness to sync up the blockchain.
I also run a VSC node for the upcoming layer 2 chain. I plan to support this to the same degree I do Hive.
Every vote helps to ensure HIVE is decentralised and secure. Please consider voting for me.