Signing on as a BitShares Witness

It's been about a month since I joined the group of witnesses for Steemit, and today I will take another step of signing on as a witness for BitShares DEX.

Ever since I first started to use BitShares, which was shortly after I started to use Steemit, I have enjoyed every minute of it. This open market where you can trade openly without the risk of your assets is a groundbreaking and highly undervalued system.

The main reason I join in as a witness is because I wish to contribute to this wonderful system. Witnesses are conduits between the chain and the many users, it's our responsibility not only to make sure it runs smoothly but also to speak up when it doesn't for the users. We should listen in on the pace of the users on it.

My Steemit Witness Progress

My witness progress on Steem has been very successful so far and I keep witnessing about 10-12 block each day. My setup has been working very well with only two missed blocks so far, one being because I made a typo when I started, the second was a very temporary issue of network connection. All in all a pretty decent four weeks so far. Read My Steemit Witness Intent Post

Why me?

I'm an active member of the Gridcoin community and have been running the official blockexplorer for almost a year soon. As I said before I'm also an active witness for Steem and try to the best of my abilities to read up and keep track of changes and updates to the network and read up on the users expectations and wishes. I have my standard and wishes on how things should work, but it's also my obligation to assess the users needs and wishes. I frequently join the Beyond Bitcoin, BitShares and Gridcoin Mumble Hangouts and will do so in the future as well, which is a great place for updates and communication.

I have over 15 years of experience of running servers with various types of applications, this is nothing new to me and I'm quite diverse in ways to make sure things stay running even when I'm not around. My current setup alerts me if any of my systems services goes down or something isn't running, which I plan to keep working and refining on since it's vital that everything keeps running.

The presense of witnesses of BitShares is in my opinion too low; something that was raised in the latest BitShares Mumble session when we started to discuss things about changes that where needed on the network, only one witness was actually joining in. I'm not saying they are not very good witnesses, but we also need witnesses that are joining the crowd and listening in on the phase, something I will do. Simple and clearly new blood as @xeroc puts it.

In that same way I now wish to become part of the very best cryptocurrency exchange you can find. I will make sure to do my very best to keep it that way.

I like doing tutorials about these things; making the general public aware of the functionality of systems and how they work.

I will earn nothing until I become one of 25 active witnesses

There are some key differences between BitShares and Steemit when it comes to witnesses. On Steemit there are 20 main witnesses, every 21 block goes to a backup witness. I'm currently no. 61, and as a backup witness I witness about 1 block every 2 hours. You also don't pay any fees to become one, hence it's an easy thing to decide to start up.

On BitShares you have to become a lifetime member and pay for advertising a witness, something that may stop the every day joe to start up. There are also only active witnesses, no backup. This means that until I reach a position of an active witness I will not witness any block at all. This doesn't stop me from doing my run for witness and I know that I will eventually, hopefully, be able to contribute to the network that I've grown to love.

I will initially use the same setup system that I have for my Steem witness nodes, if it comes to the stage that they are required to run on their own servers I will be quick to react. The current servers are well equipped to handle the extra load of running another witness system.

System Setup

I have two witness systems; One Main witness and one backup in case of something happening. Both these systems run on a 6-core, 24GB Ram, 100% SSD server.

Neither of these nodes are accessible from the outside, they can only witness the blockchain. All to make the systems secure enough.

The Income from Being a Witness

I see many great opportunities for supporting communities or projects; exploring new ways for progress. I wish to support the communities that are close to my heart, but also to expand the horizon of what can be done with cryptocurrency. I see things like Whaleshares by @officialfuzzy as a very inspiring project.

How to vote for me

Anyone that owns BTS (BitShares) can vote on the BitShares platform, just like on the Steemit platform. If you think that I will be suited for a BitShares Witness I would be very happy if you would vote for me. On BitShares my active witness is called @sc-ol

In the BitShares Wallet

Click "Account" on the top left
Click "Voting" in the left menu (4th in the menu)
Click "Witnesses" in the menubar on the voting page
Type in "sc-ol" in the textfield and press "Add"

Thank you for your support and trust!

I hope I can gain your trust in becoming one of the nodes on the witness list that You trust and rely on.

Joining in as BitShares Witness