First Sicarius Witness Update

Hello Hive Community!

This is a pretty exciting post for me to write as it is my first official Hive account@sicarius witness update! For transparency and a little better of an idea on some reasons to vote for my witness, I also wanted to talk about some recent changes that I had made to my witness for the benefit of the hive community and also talk about some of the projects I am currently contributing to as well.

Witness Updates

A lot has happened since booting up and enabling my Hive witness for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Being the hobbyist developer, and lets be honest, tech-nerd that I am, I at first was attempting to implement the Sicarius witness node on an unused older Dell poweredge t320 server that I had laying around my office. At the time, the server was running RHEL 7, which I quickly learned did not work too well for the node implementation due to its outdated bash shell and older linux kernel.

After a few hours of workarounds and such, I decided that it was time to give up and reprovision the server to a different operating system. I was unsure at first if the older hardware would run Ubuntu 20.04, but with some reassurance from Hive account@someguy123 (thanks for your advice btw), I gave the install a whorl. To my surprise, Ubuntu installed like a charm!! From there, I rebuilt my node and starter er up. Alas, I ran into another snag nonetheless, as I only had 16 gb's of RAM dedicated to the server, which didn't quite fit the bill of the speed and reliability I wanted for running my witness. That being said, I moved it to a new machine with better resources dedicated to it, and am happy to say that I have 100% uptime and great speed/reliability!

After the painstaking hours of troubleshooting, the next thing to do was tweak my witness parameters to be more favorable for the Hive community. The Sicarius witness now operates with a low cost account creation fee of 1.5 Hive, a favorable HBD interest rate of 7%, and optimal account creation subsidies modeled after the witness that Hive account@smooth operates. Since firing up my witness, I am proud to say that I have been able to move up to the 146th active witness spot, but my goal is to be within the top 100. In order to accomplish that feat, I need help from the Hive community!

Why vote for witnesses anyway?

Using your 30 witness votes is one of the best ways you can take part in Hive governance and ensure that the witnesses that help to secure the chain are the ones most trusted by the community; not just those with a lot of money and enormous amounts of influence over exchanges (looking at you justin sun).

As stated in my witness description, the goal of the Sicarius witness is to not only take part in securing the Hive community that I love, but also to use a majority of the funds generated from operating my witness to help support projects built on Hive as well as improvements to the Hive protocol itself. I have personally been dedicating a good part of my free time to developing for Hive, specifically helping to weed out bugs and also to add features to commonly used dev libraries (beempy, hive-js, etc) for Hive that everyone can use, which will hopefully help draw interest in more development of dApps on Hive. I will be writing another post later going a little bit more in depth on that as well.

I certainly am not the only witness dedicating time, personal funds, and resources to the improvement of Hive and projects on it. Many many of the current witnesses are community managers, developers, project builders, and more. I would definitely take a moment to see what the witnesses you vote for are doing for Hive and give them an occasional (or frequent) kudos/thanks. I think one of the coolest things about the Hive community is many of these individuals aren't operating these things for a profit, but instead to simply help contribute to a better future for Hive and humanity.

As I had said above, my goal is to be able to get into the top 100 active witnesses in the next couple of months, but I need your help! If you have any extra witness votes, please consider voting for the Sicarius witness at https://vote.hive.uno/@sicarius.

Special thanks

I also want to give a quick special thanks to some individuals out there who have helped provide tools that I use on Hive as well as some who have provided help/advice with the witness operation. These include:

Hive account@rishi556 for a some direction on witness properties and for connecting me with some awesome communities where I have learned a lot

Hive account@someguy123 for offering lots of technical advice and for alleviating my frustrations by getting me to switch from RHEL7 to Ubuntu lol

Both of the above have also done lots of great things and dedicated their personal time to creating open source tools/libraries for the community

Hive account@markymark deserves a thanks for Hive tools, which I often use, as well as running lots of contests, etc, to help increase interest in Hive/projects

Hive account@holger80 for beempy, which is probably my favorite/most-used library for interacting with Hive (plus I love python way more than javascript haha)

I am probably missing a few people here, but a big thanks for all of those devs, community managers, project leaders, and more who are dedicating their time to making Hive a better platform for all! I also want to give a thanks to all of those who have voted for and supported the Sicarius witness so far.

I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of their friday, and if anyone ever has any questions for me specifically or about Hive, I am always happy to interact with fellow community members. You can find me on discord and more, just ask!

Until next time,
Sicarius

TLDR: Don't forget to use your witness votes, and if you have any extra, consider voting for https://vote.hive.uno/@sicarius