Meet Our Steem Witness With @someguy123. Episode 20

Today I would like to introduce you to Chris. Chris goes by the username Hive account@someguy123. He is the owner of https://anon.steem.network/, a site where you can register your new steemit account and bypass all the hassles of the regular signup process. You can easily sign up using
anon.steem service and start steeming right away.

If you are new to steemit and haven't created an account, sign up here

https://anon.steem.network/<

What you need to know about Hive account@someguy123

How did you first hear about steemit and what made you decide to join?

It's a rather odd story. I never really thought much about Steemit, and was put off by a lot of the FUD. However, someone came into my Litecoin Slack asking for someone to act as Escrow for a giveaway on Steemit.

You can check out my introduction post where I explained it in detail. The basics are - I acted as an escrow for a giveaway, that giveaway upset a lot of people as "vote buying", and ended up getting seriously flagged.

I made a post complaining about the "downvote bots", and similarly got attacked. I finally made my introduceyourself post, and ended up getting a large vote from Dan, and a few other big users, causing my introduction to hit almost $300! After that I was inclined that maybe it's not so bad, and maybe I should try to make some things.

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@someguy123/i-m-someguy123-a-well-known-developer-in-the-litecoin-community

For steemians who don't know much about witnesses, can you give a layman explanation of what it is that witnesses do?

A witness is simply a person, or a group of people, who operate a server which produces blocks for the network. Without witnesses, Steem wouldn't be possible. We process every transaction on the network, and make sure that our servers are reliable and fast so that we can handle the 3 second block times. A top 20 witness will produce a new block every single minute (63 seconds), so it's important for us to invest into hardware to ensure we can keep producing blocks without any downtime.

But, anyone can run a server and produce blocks. The witnesses who get into the top 20 do a lot more than that - we build communities, we develop software, we actively communicate with other witnesses on the state of the network and how we can help. We choose whether or not we agree with a hard fork, and we have the power to say no if we don't agree.

https://steemit.com/witness-category/@someguy123/seriously-what-is-a-witness-why-should-i-care-how-do-i-become-one-answer

Being a witness takes a lot of time and energy, how do you keep a balance between this and other commitments?

I schedule my days the best I can. I hired someone to work as a "second pair of eyes", to ensure my witness stays online when I'm not at home, or when I'm asleep.

Some witnesses are against other people having access to your servers, however I believe that it's impossible for one man to operate a highly reliable witness without sacrificing a lot of their life. Previously, any time I dared to travel, it'd somehow turn out to be the day of a new hardfork, or my failover system would break, and I'd have to run off to the hotel and deal with it.

For any witnesses who would consider hiring a backup administrator, it's important that they are independant, and not operating another witness on the network. This helps to keep DPOS true to it's purpose - preventing centralisation.

What is one thing that most people don't know about you?

Too many things to list, but maybe my musical side. I play the piano, the guitar, and even some harmonica 🙂. Once upon a time I also tried my hand at electronic music.

What makes you from different witnesses in the steemit community?

I'm big on community, I'm in the PAL Discord (minnowsupport), I'm in ADSactly, SteemSpeak, there's hardly any person who hasn't talked to me before. Unlike a lot of witnesses, I'm very easy to contact, and a lot of my time is spent helping other people in the community behind the scenes, like Hive account@aggroed, Hive account@jackmiller, Hive account@adsactly, etc.

I'm not always posting on Steemit, and I'm not always actively developing things, but you'll find that so many people on Steemit have talked to me, I'm always helping people in some way, whether that's guiding people with their servers, or just general advice on how to do well as a poster on Steemit.

What is the biggest challenge you have ever faced since you joined steemit?

Making it into the top 20 probably. Despite what many people think, it's a lot of time, money, and work, and is never guaranteed.

It took me over a year of development, community work, charity work, campaigning, among other things to make it to where I am. The battle never ends, it's an uphill battle just to stay in the top 20.

As one of the top witness what is your duty?

My duty is to contribute to the platform however I can.

Top witnesses get paid a lot of money, and they're expected to use it to improve the platform in some way, whether through development, building communities, marketing Steem, and many other ways to help.

I've developed many tools to make witness' lives easier, such as Steem-in-a-box, Steemfeed-JS, Steem-Bash, as well as some of the most popular technical guides.

Witnesses are also expected to help with testing out new releases - it can be a lot of stressful work. I tested Steem v0.19.10 when it was finally launched, and immediately found 2 bugs and reported them to Steemit Inc. - it's important for us to ensure the Steem network is stable and reliable.

What is the biggest challenge the steemit community must overcome before it goes widespread?

Content discovery - many people struggle to be noticed. Groups like the Minnow Support Project (ran by Hive account@aggroed, Hive account@ausbitbank, myself, Hive account@crimsonclad, Hive account@followbtcnews, and many others) work to improve this, but only so much can be done.

I think SMTs may improve this, but only time will tell.

I know that you are always busy with your computer trying to help the community, apart from that, what are the other things you enjoy doing?

Travelling the world, music, TV shows and movies. Outside of Steem, I still live a relatively normal life.

Where do you see the value of steem in the next 4-5 years along with the platform?

Honestly I couldn't say. New blockchains appear every single day, Steem will either fill a niche, compete, or die trying. Nobody can really predict where we'll be in 4-5 years, but considering we've survived the last 3 years, there's a lot of hope for the future.

Besides being heavily invested in steem, what other crypto currencies do you fancy?

I still have some faith in Litecoin, I feel that they're one of the most honest cryptocurrencies, and coblee is a great guy 🙂

Other than that, I have a big mixed bag of cryptocurrencies. I'm invested in EOS like a lot of other people, and I think it could go very far. I'm even running a Block Producer with my company privexinceos on there 🙂

Some people have called crypto currency the internet 2.0 while other think it is just a hiccup in evolution, what are your thoughts on the future of crypto?

Cryptocurrency is to money, what email was to mail. Taking away the centralisation of banks, much like email helped remove the power of the post offices of the world.

The future of cryptocurrency depends on how easily normal people can get it. In the US for example, it's rather frustrating - strict regulations mean Coinbase is one of the only options.

Thankfully, most of Europe is embracing is, even if the US is making it harder for the normal person each day. In the UK I'm able to buy and sell crypto quite easily, and there are many websites that make it possible without needing to deal with endless KYC crap (ID verification, bank verification, etc).

As a big fan of cryptocurrency, what is the possible best way to keep tokens secure

Hardware wallets. There's many available, Trezor and Ledger being some of the most well known.

With hardware wallets, you use the desktop/mobile app to send from your hardware wallet, and push a button on the hardware wallet to confirm it. This protects you against even your computer being compromised.

I'm not aware of any hardware wallets for STEEM, but we do have "savings accounts". If you put your coins in there, it takes 3 days to withdraw - this gives you time to change your password, or recover your account before your coins are stolen.

For extra security, make a few accounts, and maybe store some on exchanges. I keep my various coins spread across hardware wallets, desktop, mobile, and exchanges. As the old saying goes "don't keep your eggs in one basket".

How do you know the best time to buy or sell a coin?

I'm not a professional trader, so I can't really say. I often hold my coins, I rarely buy or sell.

News can be a good indicator on whether to buy or sell. Government regulation and crackdown often causes a lot of selling, where-as good news such as countries becoming more crypto friendly often causes the price to go up.

What do you think is the future of cryptocurrency?

As I explained in the "internet 2.0" question, it depends entirely on how easily people can buy, sell, and use their crypto.

I definitely believe there's a strong future. The vast majority of my money is in cryptocurrency.

It helps when merchants take cryptocurrency directly. Currently the majority of merchants take their coins via a processor such as BitPay or Coinbase, who immediately sell the coins they receive, causing downward pressure on the markets...

At my company Privex, we take crypto, and we pay our suppliers in crypto. We avoid leaving the crypto ecosystem the best we can.

What will be the implications of government having a say in cryptocurrency world?

Sometimes good things, sometimes bad things. Too much regulation makes it difficult and scary for people to get into cryptocurrency, and with the amount of exchanges getting hacked - this leaves a lot of people vulnerable to identity theft.

Light regulation can help ensure safer exchanges, for example it'd be great if exchanges were forced to keep 80-90% of customer's funds in cold storage 🙂

If you could only vote for one witness (not yourself) who would it be and why?

It'd probably be Hive account@jesta - I use his tools practically every day, including SteemDB and Vessel, plus he's helped me out so many times.

In five sentences or less, tell steemians why you deserve their vote.

I've built many important tools for Steem, such as AnonSteem which is probably the biggest account creator, second to Steemit Inc, as well as many tools used by witnesses such as Steem-in-a-box, Steemfeed-JS, Steem-Bash etc.
I'm one of the most active "community" witnesses, you'll see me in the #witness channel on steem.chat almost every day helping people out.
A lot of the SP that I earn gets given back to the community through delegation; I delegate without any expectation of reward to various projects such as Hive account@minnowsupport, Hive account@airhawk-project, and Hive account@steemexchanger - and I'm always looking for more to delegate to 🙂
I started one of the first STEEM-focused businesses, Hive account@privex (https://www.privex.io) - unlike many companies, we don't use a third party payment processor; we receive a lot of our income in STEEM/SBD, and pay our staff and suppliers with STEEM/SBD where possible.

If you could have a privilege to change something about steemit, what would it be?

Possibly I'd change it so that instead of a promoted tab, we'd have 2 "promoted" posts on top of trending, which shuffle between the top 10 most promoted posts.

Currently the promoted tab is practically useless, and everyone just uses bid bots. I think if we had this change, people may use the internal non-profit promotion system instead of bid bots.

Thanks for having this conversation with me.