The Witness Business: Promises of Riches

Today I'd like to talk about something that's been bothering me for a while. It's about the new witnesses. But before I get to that, I want to introduce Hive account@jerrybanfield. This post is not meant to demean Jerry in any way, but to clear up the witness misconceptions resulting from his blog. In fact, he's had my witness vote for a while now, so this is not about flaming him or anything like that.

Who is Hive account@jerrybanfield

Jerry is a successful blogger, with a huge follower base. He has his own website, 2.2 million likes on Facebook, 105K followers on Twitter, 200K subscribers on Youtube and of course almost 14,000 followers on Steemit. Those are impressive figures and reflect Jerry's great accomplishments. Jerry likes to write and talk about everything: helpful stuff for minnows, personal stories, finance, analyses, etc. He passionately talks a lot, buzzes my head sometimes, but nonetheless he brings many values to the platform, which appeals to a lot of people and reaches a wide audience.

Snake Oil?

However, I do not agree with Jerry's views when it comes to his witness advertising, I'm afraid his posts about this are too simplistic for a complex process. He makes it sound too easy, with the constant promise of riches, always underlining the daily rewards of the Top 20 witnesses.

(Yes Jerry it's ~ $260, not $295)

The mentality of "it's easy, I can do it, so can you" is far from reality. Although Jerry is inspirational and motivational in his blog, the witness business may not be meant for everyone. Being a witness is not easy, I wrote about that, so did other witnesses:

Jerry combined Hive account@lexiconical's research about the Top 20 witnesses and their skills, which I appreciate by the way. If you read them, you'll know that those guys are at the top for a good reason: hard work, technical skills, and time to get to the top!

Surely you can follow Hive account@someguy123's guide to setting up a Witness Server (STEEM-in-a-box HF19), but if you can't understand the content of the Dockerfile, or can't set up a node manually from scratch like @timcliff underlined, if the shit hits the fan, what then? You can end up missing blocks and losing your rank very quickly. In fact, that's what happened to my friend Hive account@netuoso, who is a very skilled developer by the way, when he went out for a day in the woods. It's like the apocalypse happening in the blink of an eye. Furthermore, another top witness, Hive account@jesta, had all of this servers go down a couple weeks ago because of his provider system-wide restarts. If this can happen to the best, imagine the consequences for a newbie witness!

Stop the Seduction

Please Jerry, stop inspiring people to start a witness like you did. You have a huge follower base that can support you; you have a big stake with your steem power. The average users do not have that. They'll be embarking on a difficult path not necessarily meant for them. In fact, I've personally helped many newbie witnesses set up, only to see them quit after a month. Wasted my time, wasted their time and money.

Here's an example of a fresh witness, obviously lacking the skills to be a witness (with a questionable blog to begin with...)
https://steemit.com/witness/@kimterje83/yes-i-made-a-witnes-server-on-privex-50usd-instance

_{Proud member and delegator of the Hive account@minnowsupport project.

Join us on https://discord.gg/GpHEEhV}