Greetings
fellow Steemians.
here with an update on recent Witness business. As my followers would know, I have been doing a pretty good job at living up to my name lately. Whether I am kicking a hornet's nest, or leading the charge, remains to be seen, but I fully believe in what I am doing and this is literally now my full time job.
Yes, I finally got my just reward after almost 6 months, seeming to write for pennies, and now I have an ample surplus and I am very passionate about this platform, but not necessarily the current caretakers of it, my passion is from the ideas it is built on and the people who have gravitated towards it.
Like any place, it's a mixture of all sorts, and I will however say that bad incentives and a bad culture has been a problem for a long time, and is only slowly starting to improve.
Witness Policies
1. Block Size, Account Fee and Minnow Vote Slider
I am signalling for an increase in the block size to 128kb, in order to accommodate the rapidly accelerating rate of new user signups. Without this change, the Minnows cannot have a vote slider, so this is essential, and I admonish all users, especially new ones, to make a noise about this. The minnows and newbies experience is radically different from the rest of us, and this needs to change.
So that leads to another option for resolving this, which is to raise the account fee so the bandwidth available to minnows allows them to make more, fractionally weighted votes. I might also suggest that they could at least have 1-10 levels, or even 1-5, these would enable more votes than now, but not as many as the rest of us who can vote even with fractions of a percent, if we hax the code using python or javascript to make our votes.
For now I am setting the account fee to the parameter '1.000', which is in fact 30 Steem, which means I am suggesting that accounts should start at a value of around $50 a piece. This means 10 times as much bandwidth is available to a baseline account. Note that Steemit, Inc. has now adopted a more sensible policy, and instead of giving away Steem Power, they are now lending it to new users with (I think) revocable delegation.
Yes, in theory, they could yank these new accounts initial minimum deposits. Because I don't want to see this risk continue, ultimately I would want to stick to the original $10 worth of Steem as the minimum deposit, and the option of increasing block size is my preferred option, and I want to see exposed on the Steemit interfaace, the ability to buy accounts instead of the slow and laborious process of getting free ones through social network and mobile phone accounts.
One or more of these options needs to be applied, quick-like, because the people are signing up in droves now, and the UX (user experience) of the minnows is really bad. You don't want to go back there if you have over 500SP, and nobody should be subjected to this. It's not training wheels, it's a wheelchair.
2. Anti-Self-Voting campaign - The 
As I have discussed intensively over the last 3 days, I am campaigning to have self voting removed. 
Note that these are preliminary numbers and subsequent data varies up and down. Also, it is possible that the growing number of posts expressing condemnation for this activity is having an effect by itself.
We will be making our bot produce some quite comprehensive analytics of daily activities relating to this subject, because there is very good reason to believe that we are going to find that self voting is draining the rewards pool, and this is also leading to selling pressure on the price, which is why it's hovering around 1.7 at the moment. This is self voters, who after licking their balls, are ... I'm sorry, but it really is that dirty and disgusting. These people should be ashamed of themselves, and this is exactly why
Note that although we were initially thinking that she would attempt to neutralise, I am now pushing for a purely superficial attack, specifically, that we will be simply marking every self vote on a comment, on an account over 1000SP, with a 1% flag, which will do zero to the rewards, but it will put nasty little pox on their comments, that these votes deserve.
Radical Transparency
I believe that the great majority of witnesses, with the exceptions of the ones I vote for, are not who you think they are, they do not engage with the community enough, by and large, and those who do are disingenuous in their dealings. As such, as candidate for Witness, a vote for me represents a vote for the end of nepotism within the Steem community, around the developer and whale circle.
I review my witness voting schedule on a regular basis, and I do not want to recommend anyone proxy my vote choices, but if you want to, that is up to you. When you look at https://steemd.com/@l0k1 - down the left hand side near the bottom of the left sidebar, you can see who I vote for:
I have had some, and in some cases, very extensive, dealings with all of these people, and I vouch for them, though a few I know less than others, some are new witnesses who I have had some chats with so far and they seem like good people, and I want to give newcomers a welcome, as is the custom here in the Steemosphere.
How to vote for l0k1
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@l0k1/how-to-vote-for-l0k1-s-witness
Unfortunately, many fonts used on computers can be quite ambiguous between the 'l' '1' and 'I' This is also why bitcoin addresses and even Steem addresses, use the more compact key representation called Base58. This is basically all letters, capitals and small, and numbers, with all similar shapes eliminated. '0' and 'O' are another two letters that are also ambiguous and thus not present.
My username can be more easily read if I make it really big, the default font for steemit.com is not too bad at disambiguating l and 1 but closer up helps. I can easily forget, lately, because I have a High DPI monitor now, so I see the text like it's printed on paper:
Closing comments
I am now in the position to do what I hoped I would be able to do when I first started running a witness back in November-December last year, while I was living at the Winteropvang in Amsterdam, because of the serious way in which I took my work, basically as a full time job, to write, and now to be, essentially, a Senator in the Witness Congress. I am the Ron Paul of circa 2007 US Federal Congress.
Like Ron, I don't give a damn about what the other witnesses think about me, or the whales, I only care about how the platform works, that we ensure that we continue to improve the system and attract more users and more investors, and I am very keen on busting the closed cliques that largely control, still, the development process.
Steem started out with a lot of nice sounding ideas, but as some people would know, all was not always as it seemed. Many of the ideas turned out to be completely wrong, or backwards, that were in the Whitepaper, but the essential elements still stand strong, and form the pillars of what we are all building together here.
I see Steem as the first fully functioning Distributed Autonomous Organisation. What I mean by this, is that this system enables us to decide who deserves to get paid for the work they are putting on display in the forum, and so, who gets paid, determines who then can continue to expand their activities. Steem has a corporate voting system, a Board of Directors (witnesses), and it is completely open to new members, even to take on the job like Witness.
Just like in real life, except here the barrier for entry is a lot smaller. You don't have to have tens of thousands of dollars to become a witness, just some technical skills and an interest in serving the community.
Stay safe out there, my friends, and don't feed the trolls!
PS
I forgot to set this post to declined payout, but rest assured, I am not sitting on my laurels, I am going out on a limb here by challenging the established status quo, and while I could probably continue to make a living, between mining for altcoins, writing for Steem, and running a backup witness, I would be in a position to do a lot more for the community if I was top 19. I am more than capable of running an extremely high quality cluster of Steem servers, if I was voted into the top 19, I would be running a Seed and RPC node on a machine with gigabit bandwidth, a pair of lighter-weight witness servers for the block production, and developing new applications that integrate with Steem.
Specifically what I was doing previously with my work on 'Dawn', well, as some may know as I have mentioned before, 
Thus, the blockchain framework I have started designing, with the 4 primary protocols, is what I would be spending my witness pay on developing, and then from that, a messaging system that is integrated with the Steem blockchain account registry, as well as a better, more user friendly front-end for the site, that will be better than steemit.com, busy.org and chainBB, as well as building the fundamental tech that would be required to implement the next generation of Steem infrastructure, which will have sub-1-second transaction clearance times, and the ability to not just post text, but also to post any form of media.
I also am including a framework to enable application databases that can potentially be used even for realtime virtual worlds along the lines of World of Warcraft, because the database replication protocol is so damned fast, and designed to minimise latency as much as possible with geographical sharding and fractal epidemic propagation. And lastly, the implementation of a distributed content distribution network where a new job is created for users, caching and delivering the media posted by users.
Does that sound like something you want for the future of this platform? If so, vote for me, and I will do everything I can to make it happen, and I am very much interested in anyone who wants to join me, who wants training in running a witness, email me at l0k1@null.net or chat in the steemit.chat, and let's make this happen.