Let’s bridge the gap between Steemians to Witnesses, they say.
I recently received a transfer from 
Thank you for supporting Steem by maintaining your witness. Steemians have created the first
By the way:
Witnesses were notified by a memo transfer that contained the following message:
I don’t think that’s the best way of letting users know. Many tend to ignore such messages due to the amount of spam from re-steem pseudo-services, or bit bots.
In my opinion, leaving a comment in reply to the most recent post of a witness that also tags their nickname is a better way to achieve this result.
Here are my answers:
What is your position/stance on bid-bots (ownership/delegations/opinion)? -
,
I don’t own, operate, use, or delegate my SP to any bid-bot or paid voting service.
I’m not a fan, but it’s up to users to decide how they use their SP.
What does the witness want to do to make the blockchain more user-friendly and help to on-board new users. What do THEY personally want to see done and what will they do to get it there? -
Everything is done on the UI/UX level. Users don’t need to know the inner workings of the platform’s mechanics. It’s all about how things are presented to them so they can learn as they go along.
Gamification is the key. As a witness, I’m really far away from the UI/UX level, but I endorse gamification whenever I can.
Shout-out to 
I help newbies on the Steem.Chat (shout-out to #help’ful 
Do you think votes for witnesses should last indefinitely or should they time out (or perhaps decay over time) so that periodically voters will need to reevaluate and affirm their positions by recasting their votes? -
It some rare cases, maybe, yes, but I believe that this should happen only in the event of lost keys (or lives) and with an adequate delay (a year or two).
Features that I consider as prerequisites:
reset_account
Arhag's idea about Deadman switch / Will / Recovering accounts from lost passwords
Do you think the 30 witness votes each steemian gets is the correct number, especially in light of the fact there are only 20 top witnesses to be seated? -
Thirty is the correct number.
As an SP holder, I want to have a choice and approve enough witnesses to protect the security and reliability of the network, so I believe that the number of voting slots needs to be at least 21. I’d rather increase the number of votes than decrease it. However, I can also see some valid arguments in favor of the opposite trend.
What is a concern or two that you have about the #steem blockchain? -
Performance at scale. Don’t get me wrong: we are fast, and we can grow a lot, but we need to think a few steps ahead in order not to be taken by surprise. It’s important especially now when we need to optimize our operational costs during bear market conditions without affecting user experience.
What are you hopeful about for the #steem blockchain? -
The people who use Steem. Just ask the SteemFest participants.
For beginner witnesses, it is equal to the cost of a decent, low latency storage (NVMe or SSD at least) with 48GB or 64GB of RAM. Then you add more pieces like a public seed node, a backup node or two, some helper resources, monitoring, security measures, redundancy (network uplinks, power supplies) and so on.
Infrastructure is my particular area of interest, so the infrastructure I have is not necessarily the same as what other witnesses use.
Nowhere. I’ve not powered down yet. But that’s meant to compensate for my involvement (both my time and my hardware resources)
Supporting various service providers, exchanges, Steem.Chat. I wouldn’t even call them projects. It’s one big “being a witness” project. Powering up the Steem platform.
It’s supposed to be an account for all of my non-witness activities.
Witnessing firsthand the development of an extraordinary platform.
The Steem platform’s decentralized nature means that all you need is to want hard. You set a signing key for your account and vote for yourself as a witness.
Theoretically, you are a witness, but this doesn’t mean yet that you give to the platform what witnesses are expected to give.
You need to contribute to the network with your infrastructure (at least a block producing node, but ideally more nodes, like public seed nodes, etc.)
You need to earn the trust of the community to get votes.
There are many tutorials on what witnesses are and what you need to do to become one.
I believe that everyone should read them, not only those who want to be witnesses, because they contain a lot of useful knowledge for every user of the platform.
What do you think the SBD [STEEM] price for a new account should be? -
It’s reflected in the STEEM price. I tried to keep it relative to $3-5 before HF20. Now the registration fee is burned, so I believe that this value should be as low as possible (yet high enough to protect the namespace ). Also, please note that it’s possible to claim accounts for free when you have enough resource credits available.
You can find plenty of posts covering that subject all around Steem.
Have you implemented any new procedures for evaluating potential hardforks? -
I learned from the previous HardForks, so I’m sure I can improve the process. Keyword: tests. A lot more tests.
How does a new user make the availability of his vote known to the cabal of witnesses wannabes trying to overthrow the current witness regime? -
Availability of votes is well known. It’s on the blockchain. Please learn more before casting your votes.
In the current economic conditions? No.
What takeaways do you have from the Hardfork 20 issues that occurred? -
Such issues can happen even if we think that we’ve done enough tests. We have, however, a lot of skilled developers, witnesses, and community members to act quickly in case of emergencies, and we can handle them very well.
Do you think 20/21 top witnesses a good number or should there be more or less? -
Yes. It’s a good balance between performance and decentralization.
Thank you for caring. The reliability and security of the Steem platform is in your hands votes.
If you have more questions, you can use the steem.chat ( #witness or #witness-social channels)
