It's my pleasure to welcome you to another Meet Our Steem Witnesses - A weekly show For All Steemians.
It's a new week and I hope you all are enjoying the week already? Last week I posted my interview with 
Hive account@krnel one of the steem witnesses and it not a new thing to us that we all have 30 votes to cast for any steemit witness of our choice and I will say this is the most important 30 votes you will ever cast on this platform.
Looking at things here, the on going dip as affected the atmosphere here on Steem platform but I hope that the RockDB and SMTs would bring good impact to the Steem project. To those that might have never heard of Meet Our Steem Witnesses before, here is a recap here
For some months now, I have been interviewing some witnesses and it has been an amazing and remarkable experience presenting my their chat here for steemians to read and see what they have been up to.
Here are the links to my previous interview
You can check and read my previous interview with
reggaemuffin • exyle• adsactly-witness • felixxx • lukestokes • neoxian • abh12345 • good-karma
•liondani
• aggroed • yuriks2000 • jatinhota themarkymark • enginewitty •b0y2k • arcange •timcliff •roelandp •someguy123 •pfunk
•justyy
•yabapmatt •jackmiller •pjau •helpie •guiltyparties •krnel
make sure you follow along with the next episode.
HOW FAR SO FAR, I will continue with the interviews I have at hand before I went to the long time break. I will focus on those once first before moving the the new one.
So today, I will be posting my interview with 
Hive account@prc the witness because 
Hive account@dsound
So stay tuned, follow up and learn from our witnesses.
- How did you first hear about steemit and what made you decide to join?
Hive account@prc Well, I don't recall the exact way that Steem and Steemit came to me... maybe on some youtube video or something, but the moment that I knew about it I couldn't grasp the exact economy around it. The concept was interesting but I had to read the white paper to get an understanding of what was going on in the platform. It was early days still and not much information and documentation was available... I was already into crypto and blockchain development, so it made it easier to get my head around it and thinking of giving it a try!
- For steemians who don't know much about witnesses, can you give a layman explanation of what it is that witnesses do?
Hive account@prc A witness is a member of the Steem community that has an infrastructure of servers maintaining the network and validating that all the transactions on the Steem blockchain are valid. As Steem blockchain consensus algorithm is Proof of Stake, each witness member can be elected by all other members with stake in the network to perform these activities more often, so that his responsibility in network decisions grows. Also, as the witness responsibility grows, it starts to become more important to put your hands on the community aspects besides the network, so each witness usually have other community projects that bring value to the ecosystem.
- Being a witness takes a lot of time and energy, how do you keep a balance between this and other commitments?
Hive account@prc Yes, it is difficult to manage but it is possible. Probably the most difficult part is the community interaction for me, so I got people to help me out with that, so that I continue to dedicate myself to the technical and development part of DSound, which is my project to help Steem reach bigger audiences in the music industry. I also do some community related activities in the Portuguese members which are growing significantly this year...
- What is one thing that most people don't know about you?
Hive account@prc My age... I always say that I am 18 yo + VAT! smiley
- What makes you from different witnesses in the steemit community?
Hive account@prc I am the only witness from Portugal, and my focus is empowering the musicians, singers, producers and DJs in the platform to become more independent and be able to make a living with their music!
- What is the biggest challenge you have ever faced since you joined steemit?
Hive account@prc Well, I think the biggest challenge for me, or anyone that joins Steem ecosystem, is to understand the economy around it and how to get from where you don't even get noticed to a point where what you contribute is meaningful to some people. Then, you begin to think about Steem as a different paradigm and you get ready to contribute to everyone and get the appreciation of your work as your reward!
- As one of the witnesses what is your duty?
Hive account@prc Every witness has 2 different duties: the technical and the community driven ones. The technical duty is to have a good infrastructure of servers that keep the network safe and performant and this is common to any witness. The community part is where it differs from witness to witness, and mine is to enable people to be great at what they do and make a living doing what they love. I started with musicians for now with DSound, but there are more ideas in my mind...
- What is the biggest challenge the steemit community must overcome before it goes widespread?
Hive account@prc For Steem to get world wide adoption it has to have more easier way of on boarding the platform. Also it needs to grow the infrastructure so that it scales well. Both these issues are being addressed as we speak and I am looking forward to the outcomes on next updates.
- 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?
Hive account@prc In my case it is music. I am a musician, producer and DJ, so whenever I can I dive into my music projects or get some DJ gig to get my needed stress relief! smiley
- Where do you see the value of steem in the next 4-5 years along with the platform?
Hive account@prc Steem is a very valuable platform. Actually I don't know why the price of Steem is not already in the 2 digits... I really think that Steem is undervalued and once we get to a stage where mainstream adoption is near, I expect that the price of Steem will get easily to 2 digit area. And I don't think we'll need 4-5 years for that! SMT's should be near and that will be the turning point, I think...
- What's the big plans you are working on to make steemit great?
Hive account@prc I am developing DSound and working hard to get DSound to beta stage and try it out in a wide musician community around the world. This is getting closer!
- Besides being invested in steem, what other crypto currencies do you fancy?
Hive account@prc I am a blockchain enthusiast since the beginning, so obviously Bitcoin is one of the major ones. Then I love many other projects and so I am invested in them, like EOS, Ethereum, Dash, Nano, Lisk and many others...
- 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?
Hive account@prc I am sure that crypto and blockchain have marked the Internet forever! It is still early stage but I cannot see the global network rolling back these innovations ever. The Internet will have normal/conventional systems alongside with secure, trust-less and decentralised ones when their nature requires such characteristics and this will be mandatory in the future for many services that we all need and will rely on.
- What will be the implications of government having a say in cryptocurrency world?
Hive account@prc Well, I am probably the worse person in the world to talk about governments, as I am a voluntarist and anarcho-capitalist by heart, but imagining that the governments will have to be around while we move on and render them pointless, then I think that they will do their best to stick their nose in cryptocurrencies as they can... It is up to us to design more secure, decentralised, immutable and private systems and prevent them from going too deep!
- If you could only vote for one witness (not yourself) who would it be and why?
Hive account@prc This is a tough one... There are many great witnesses. But if I could only vote one, I think I would have to pick 
Hive account@drakos because he is the most active helping out other witnesses and because I think he will bring new life to the top 20 witnesses.
- In five sentences or less, tell steemians why you deserve their vote.
Hive account@prc My fellow Steemians, I am probably the worse person to talk about me and why I deserve your vote... I don't like this. So I prefer to let you know what I've done and what I'll continue to do, then it is up to you to figure out the rest...
Hive account@prc I am the creator of DSound (https://dsound.audio), a platform based on Steem blockchain to publish audio, like songs or podcasts or anything else with audio and get rewards for producing the best content. I'm also responsible for managing the curation in the DSound content, and I have been working on it hugely to make DSound trending and hot pages the best they can be, and so far I think that they are filled with the best of the best audio content on Steem.
Hive account@prc DSound is still in it's infancy and is getting better and better... I will continue to improve it and get it to mass adoption on many market places. The musicians, singers, bands, producers, DJs or podcasters need and deserve this!
Hive account@prc I also try to help out in many ways the musicians on the Steem platform. And also help to grow and spread the word about Steem in Portugal.
Hive account@prc So, this is the last sentence and it will be: voting in Steem platform is one of the most important things you have to do, so vote for the witnesses you know what they do and you want to support their activities to improve Steem! smiley
- If you could have a privilege to change something about steemit, what would it be?
Hive account@prc This is an easy one: the brand and design of Steemit! I think the platform needs more distinction from Steem (the blockchain), STEEM (the currency) and Steemit (the main frontend)... And Steemit, as the main frontend, need to be welcoming and presenting the new users with a great user experience, so that they feel at home. A lot of progress has been done, but I think that there is much more that can be done in this direction to improve retention and to capture new communities.
Thank you all for reading. Like I said before, I feel so amazing to be back again and I promise you all more and interesting episode of this interview. So today i call it the end of this week episode of meet our steem witnesses. Until next time, I love you all.
PS Possibly you have any show, event or project you want me to feature on Meet our Steem Witnesses feel free to drop it in the comment section below. Thank you
