I have been hard at work improving and hardening my witness servers, and I am now running a public seed node.
I have been an active witness for a little bit over 3 days now, and am very proud of the fact that I have yet to encounter any issues or missed blocks. Although I am currently the 45th witness out of 45 active witnesses, I couldn't be happier to have been able to support the network over the past few days. So what have I been up to lately?
Offering a reliable seed node for the Peerplays network.
All of my servers are spread out throughout the US, and each use a different provider and ssh key. The establishment of the seed node was straight forward, and I have done testing to ensure that it is working properly and efficiently. I am using a more powerful server than the seed node requires, and I intend to continue to scale my infrastructure to levels past what is required. I have the ability to increase the size of any of my servers within a matter of minutes, and would be able to do so without taking my witness or seed node offline. The requirements for witness servers and seed nodes will increase as more activity and transactions come to the network, and I will ensure that I always have excessive speeds and storage compared to what the network requires.
My peerplays seed node is located at 45.77.1.129:7777
I increased the size of my backup witness node to ensure that it could handle the required activity in the case that I needed it.
While the Peerplays network really only requires a server with 2gb ram, the requirements are bound to increase quickly as the adoption and usage of the Peerplays platform increases. I am running all of my servers with specs over double what is required, and I am planning to continue upgrading and increasing the specs of my servers on a continual basis over the following months. While I always want to make sure I have a more powerful infrastructure than I need, I am a fan of continually scaling the size of the servers rather than start them all out at incredibly powerful specs. I will upgrade my infrastructure the second it starts to look like the network is seeing more activity, but the transaction levels currently indicate that my current infrastructure is more than capable of handling the required level of activity.
Submitted a Coin Request to Poloniex for Peerplays(PPY).
This is a very straight forward process and only took me less than 10 minutes total, and you dont even need a Poloniex account to submit the request. I urge anyone interested in supporting Peerplays to consider taking a few minutes to submit a request. Simply go to https://poloniex.com/coinRequest and then fill out the required information. I will post an example from when I submitted my request, and I strongly urge you to consider helping Peerplays to gain more attention and interest.
I intend to deploy a testnet in the near future, so that I can get comfortable by the time DApps are live on the network.
Any DApps on the Peerplays platform will need to be tested extensively prior to deployment on the live network, and I intend to offer support in testing and reviewing potential DApps and/or other network additions or changes. As time goes on and changes are proposed to the platform, I will make sure that I do my very best to offer an in-depth and easy to understand summary of the proposed changes and their impact, and I will take users suggestions and input seriously. At the end of the day the stakeholders (both big and small) hold all of the power over my ability to produce blocks and be an active witness, and I will always work in the best interests of the Peerplays project.
My motivations for offering myself as a witness were not based in monetary incentives, but rather I strongly believe in the true power that blockchain technology holds. Peerplays holds serious potential to gain mainstream attention and adoption in the near future, and I am eager to help to make that happen in any way that I can. The network has been running smooth for some time now, and I am very optimistic about what we will see from Peerplays in the near future. I truly enjoy being able to offer my services to the Peerplays network, and have been taking jy duties and responsibilities extremely seriously. It isn't just my chance at an active witness position on the line, but it's also my reputation on the line.
If you have any comments, questions, input, disscussions, ect. please don't hesitate to leave them in the comments below. Thanks for reading!
