Witnesses, the Blockchain Ninjas, Ancient Wizards, & Purveyors of steem tools

What do witnesses do? Every time you add any information to steemit.com, the transaction is stored in a block on the blockchain. The blocks then get sent over to a witness node for verification and if this witness misses the block, its lost forever. These are the folks that are keeping our blockchain decentralized and functioning with their own money! There are 27 witnesses who still hold top 100 spots and continue to receive votes even though their nodes are not functioning. The ones who are doing their jobs and those who are fighting for new positions deserve a little support from the community and some votes. Most are getting less than 10 blocks worth (.9 steem power) for this function, while many in the community get that for posting useless content.

My mission to interview as many witnesses as possible continues as I strive to introduce a more human element to the superheroes behind the curtains that continue to make steemit possible. I will continue the interviews (until no witnesses are left) to get an idea of what they are up to and how they help our community grow. For those of you who don't know exactly what a witness does, please read my last post HERE and you will get an idea of just how hard these folks work.

Today, @someguy123 #23 on the witness list, has been generous enough to answer a few questions to continue the saga. @someguy123 is an active member of the steemit.com and litecoin developer community and also frequents the PALnet discord server where he can be seen playing Scrimmy Bingus all the time.

How long have you been a member of the steemit.com community and how long have you been a witness?

I joined Steemit in August, I was hanging out over in my Litecoin slack, and someone came asking for an escrow, coblee wasn't available at the time, so I decided to help him out. I ran as escrow for a STEEM giveaway, which resulted in me getting flagged into the ground. I was pretty much ready to leave Steemit, until my article about the flag bot issue blew up thanks to @dantheman. I'm not sure when I became a witness, but I think it was about a month or 2 after joining STEEM. I have always been highly technical so I decided running a witness made a lot of sense.

As we all know steemit can be a very time consuming activity, especially for a witness. How much time do you spend on steemit a week?

I don't spend too much time on the Steemit website, but I've met a lot of people, I have maybe 200 DM chats open on STEEMIT.CHAT, being a witness gets you a lot of attention, which can be both good because you meet so many new people, but bad because I spend so much time just responding to endless PMs, looking at peoples posts I get sent, etc. I'm not sure how much time I actually spend, but steemit.chat, the PAL discord, and steemit.com consume a massive chunk of my time every week.

You are very active in the cryptocurrency community, why have you taken such an interest in steemit?

I started out in Bitcoin, moved my interest to Litecoin due to more opportunities, and after my projects paid poorly in BTC and LTC, I found Steemit to be a big motivator. Finally, I was getting payment for my work, feeling like my work mattered to people, while at the same time being compensated.

I also never thought about blogging until I found Steemit. I posted a few small articles on my website blog, but was never really motivated to write anything. Seeing that I could get paid for my writing, I decided to start writing about my opinions on privacy, encryption etc., and writing my own news articles based on events such as the censorship and oppression happening in my country, the United Kingdom. It turned out to be a great success, I thought that only my development work would get attention, but of course people were pretty interested in my privacy-related articles too, giving me another reason to keep producing content.

HF19 has brought some interesting changes to the steemconomy. How have you adjusted your node to compensate for the current version and steem/sbd prices?

Witnesses weren't really required to do anything for HF19 other than upgrade their software. The economical changes didn't need us to adjust our parameters. But yes, I upgraded about a day in advance.

As a developer, are there any major changes to the current infrastructure of steemit.com that you would like to see the developers implement?

Two words. Hide ReSteems. I don't know why this hasn't been done yet. It'd also be nice if Steemit could actually stay online, you'd think with the millions of dollars Steemit Inc. has made, that they could get some decent servers.

You run a company called @privex that offers various hosting services for others who are interested in running their own Witness node. Can you tell us a little more about what @privex offers?

We offer virtual and dedicated servers for any purpose, not just crypto-related, and currently accept purely cryptocurrencies (PayPal and banks are evil!).
We have a variety of configurations to match every need, especially witnesses (not just on STEEM, but PeerPlays, GOLOS, DECENT etc.).

We even offer a "Zero-Block Miss SLA" for STEEM and GOLOS, as we're so sure of our server hardware and network quality. Check out our thread here: @privex/we-are-privex-inc-we-accept-steem-protecting-your-privacy-in-the-cloud

Why is it important to vote for witnesses, and why should steemians vote for you?

Witnesses are what makes STEEM so great. No transaction fees, 3 second confirmation time, a somewhat stable currency (SBD), and the reason why you can post a comment and have it appear instantly to everyone else, without requiring a central server like Facebook or Google.

Why vote for me? I'm one of the oldest most reliable witnesses, I'm involved in the Minnow Support Project, ran by @aggroed @teamsteem @ausbitbank and many others, I've built the tools that many other witnesses use such as Steemfeed-JS, and Steem-in-a-box, and I've written several guides that have helped people to become new witnesses. I spend a massive amount of my time helping people who PM me via Steemit.chat, Discord, Telegram etc. I'm also the creator of AnonSteem (https://anon.steem.network/), which has helped people get their accounts instantly, rather than waiting a week for verification.

Voting for witnesses is like voting for your local rep, or president. You say "I want this person to be compensated for the work they're doing". If you find someone who's doing exceptional work, and you think they deserve to be paid more by the network, then you should see if they have a witness and you should vote for them. Without your votes, many stagnant witnesses end up in the top witnesses, people who aren't actively contibuting, many of whom don't even have a working witness.

Some people I'd recommend you vote for:

@aggroed - the "Mayor of Minnow Town", AKA the Minnow Support Program. His work has helped hundreds of small minnows make it to fame. He truly cares about the little people.
@ausbitbank - Really cool guy, always finding minnows posts and bringing them to the moon with his upvotes. One of the nicest whales you'll meet.
@timcliff - responsible for the Steemit FAQ page, helps out with the verification team, wrote various awesome guides, definitely deserving of some votes

First, point your browser to https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Vote away, using your best judgement. If you want to know more about a Witness, be sure to visit their Witness feed. You can always add in a witness who is not in the top 50, or you can choose your favorite witness (or other steemian) as a proxy and delegate your votes too!

@someguy123 witness thread

Previous Interview threads

Upcoming Interview threads

@timcliff

@dragosroua

@reggaemuffin

You can verify how well these witnesses are doing their job of verifying blocks a couple of different ways and this may also factor into voting choices.
Stats on Witness activity are available at
Steemd & Steemdb

Thanks to the PALNet and MinnowSupport project

The PALnet and MinnowSupport project is one of the fastest growing Steemit social groups supported by @aggroed @ausbitbank @theprophet0 @neoxian @someguy123 @thecryptodrive @teamsteem and @acidyo. We have over 2700 members dedicated to helping each other grow into dolphins and eventually whales, and are fueled by member delegations.

Grand total of more than 100,000 SP to help upvote minnows!