As you may know, I'm passionate about blockchain technology and decentralizing all the things: Steem decentralizes media, eosDAC decentralizes governance by building DACs, FIO decentralizes blockchain usability, and other projects I won't get into right now.
I really enjoyed Burning Man last year (read about that here) and through my work as a DACtivator, I got brought into https://campdao.com/ It's a project to be bring the DAC/DAO model to managing Burning Man camps (which can be kind of crazy). It's all been put together rather last minute, but the long and the short of it is, the custodians voted for me and asked me to represent CampDAO within Camp DECENTRAL (we'll be at 6:45 & E).
I was of course excited to go, but I also know how serious a DPoS hard fork is. I know that some things can go wrong and there are times when consensus witnesses are needed at a moment's notice to jump in and work directly with Steemit, Inc developers to help test code patches or replay nodes or give feedback. I may not be available to do that from the Playa of Burning Man. It's possible I may have Wifi, and I am able to connect to my servers remotely, but it's possible that connectivity may not be there.
As with last year, I have my business partner of over ten years, Brett Florio, who I trust with my life available as a backup. If for some reason he is not able to respond in an emergency, then my monitoring tools should disable my witness and let the next backup come up into consensus and help out. That's the beauty of the Steem blockchain! It truly is decentralized.
I've had my witness nodes running on v21 for quite some time (both MIRA and non-MIRA) without any trouble, and it looks like consensus among the top witnesses has already been found:
So... hopefully everything will go great. I've been a witness on Steem long enough to know that isn't always the case. I can remember days where most of the consensus witnesses were pulling all-nighters working to get things fixed in the heat of the moment. Hopefully, this will not be one of those situations. As a witness, you're entrusted to be available all the time and so far I have been. The timing of me being gone during this hard fork is not at all ideal, but as the title of this post says, some things just can't be moved around.
I love Steem, and though I'm doing many things in my full-time cryptocurrency career, I'm still here posting, engaging, and keeping my servers running solid. I hope to engage more, but I'm also going through a season of serious work which limits my time (not to mention my wife and three kids). I appreciate your support and hope for a smooth hard fork.
If you're not sure what a hard fork is, check out the latest post from Steemit, Inc and follow 
Thank you to all those who have continued to support me over the years both as a blogger and witness. I'm truly honored to be part of this community.
