Steemian of the Month: "The Alchemist @Reggaemuffin"!!! (part 2) wi...

In the first part we went over some of the amazing developments in @reggaemuffin's first month on steemit. Recorded on the block chain for all to see are the amazing achievements, as well as an abundance of giving to this community.

In this part we will finish up our overview of @reggaemuffin's past three months here on steemit, and do a short interview.

Highlight Reel Continued

Downvote Viewer – See Flag Wars Happen Live

The tool will watch the blockchain and display all flags that happen. It will sort and group them so you can see who f.e. votes with @cheetah for the steemcleaners.

It will also save all data so you can later review it again. But it will only collect new data while you have it open (background tab is fine).

@welcomebot teamed up with the Minnow Support Project!

The Minnow Support Project is the number one community on Steemit to incorporate training, support, and curation in order to facilitate life cycle growth on the platform from Minnowhood to Whalehood and to continue paying it forward as new members join. The Discord channel is not a business, but instead a completely voluntary public service brought to you by elected Witnesses.

The PALnet Discord channel has merged with the MSP. Collectively after 7 days there are 740 unique people that have come. There can be as many as 200 sitting in the chat.

@reggaemuffin witness log #1

I want new users to get early support

@welcomebot started to give new users upvotes thanks to the support by @thocryptodrive

@welcomebot teamed up with the Minnow Support Project to direct users to vibrant communities where they get early support

I am working on @minnowbooster, a bot that helps new users get started and that offers a convenient way to tip users with an upvote

I want to promote original content and help users who go the extra mile

I started using my @minnowbooster bot on original content I feel valuable

I will start using @minnowbooster on all new user giveaway submissions I like (and their posts) to get cool new users started and motivated

I want a fair and stable blockchain for all users

I created Downvote Viewer to give people a tool to monitor downvotes

I am planning to host my own seed node and will start that once it can improve the experience for some

I want to stop plagiarism and spam from flooding the platform

Currently educating new users about ways to counter spam

Selfvoting is a touchy subject for many, but I try to follow the way @dwinblood is proposing in his discussion posts

Supporting users like @suesa (who works on cleaning the science tag and writes awesome stories)

I want diversity of content and people living of the posts they write for niche topics

I am actively promoting Looking For Niche, a nice discord channel where you can find likeminded people and build a social circle

I hope that @minnowbooster allows me to help small communities out a lot more

Thanks to all your support I am already witness #84 after one week, that is wild!

"In Steem Secret #8, discover the easiest method investors can use to get a returns at 24% APR by leasing Steem Power via delegation at https://www.minnowbooster.net/market. This is a GREAT ALTERNATIVE to POWERING DOWN for getting liquid Steem without having to touch the principle!"

We will learn more about this during the interview coming up!

SteemGig: Help Me Crowdfund Steemit University Bags

"At my university we usually pack gift bags for the first semester students, which contain lots of goodies and stuff to help the students have a great start into their academic career.

While planning the bags for the approaching semester, an idea came to mind: We could get Steemit themed paper bags to advertise the platform to a new group of potential users."

I've just found out that these bags are currently under development. That is so fun! The "crowdfunding" post didn't make enough to pay for the bags so other sponsors were found for that but "we will put steem themed gadgets in the gift bags. This is a project which is planned to continue for multiple semesters." -@reggaemuffin

After this is when @reggaemuffin and I "met".

@inquiringtimes Bandwidth limit Exceeded

"A lot of people have gotten this error message within the past 24 hours:

This began my career as Steemit Journalist. I scoured the blockchain for information and made numerous follow up posts.

@inquiringtimes - Down the Rabbithole. The case of the Bandwidth Bug

"... we interrupt your regularly scheduled programming with this Breaking News!"

more like, "Breaking News about the Interruption of our Regularly Scheduled Programming"

After a few days of interrupted service I contacted @reggaemuffin asking if he had some information about what was going on behind the scenes, and if he could post about what's going on to help re-assure us minnows, who don't always have the most up to date info easily available.

This was the result:

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded, how Witnesses Help You

"Immediately after the first reports of the bandwidth issues, many witnesses set out to find the root cause of this problem.

It was quickly discovered that the current_reserve_ratio parameter was the reason and that increasing the block size would temporarily fix this.

So while we told other witnesses about the problem and they increased the block size, the steem developers started to work on a fix that I will review shortly."

I was amazed to hear back from @reggaemuffin and it forever saves a place in my heart for him, as he is one of the witnesses who I've been able to chat with and has been responsive to a variety of questions and concerns. I don't expect instant response, but there is communication.

His post about how witnesses have helped during our time of need led to this post by me:

@inquiringtimes - Easy Witness Voting guide - Bandwidth Limit Solution - Softfork 19.1

"In the post, @ausbitbank/witness-node-updated we are also made to understand that by going to The Steemdb Witness Page, we are able to see which witnesses have updated to 19.1 (which will ideally solve our bandwidth issue)."

Since then I've had the pleasure of occasional chats with @reggaemuffin, and he has provided me some invaluable counsel throughout my time here.

After the Bandwidth Crisis there have been few updates from Reggae, so lets move on to the interview portion and find out what he's been up to lately.

Interview

@inquiringtimes: The title to this chat says you are "AKA The Alchemist Reggaemuffin". What's that all about?

@reggaemuffin: That is from the whaleshares, they at some point gave all important people a funny nickname, and that is what I got.

@inquiringtimes: ok, so you're not literally turning lead into steem over there?

@reggaemuffin: - naaaah, more like code alchemy. I can make gold out of shitty tools.

@inquiringtimes: I understand you are studying Computer Science in University. That's gotta take a lot of your time between class, homework, and socializing.

@reggaemuffin:
yeah, it definitely does! I mean steem is taking most of my time at the moment, but, it is hard to do regular posts of a certain quality.

@inquiringtimes: I can relate to that.

@reggaemuffin: and writing witness updates when nothing changed is also really hard. The 0.19.2 update was pretty uneventful.

I am setting up a seed node at the moment and will make a witness update on that soon™

@inquiringtimes: what does the seed node do? if I'm thinking right, it basically is a redundancy in the system as a failsafe measure.

@reggaemuffin: Witnesses are producing blocks. to do that they have to catch up on the system. Since witnesses are hidden, you can't just ask other witnesses, that is what seed nodes are for. They give you access to all blockchain data so your witness can catch up on all others. So a seed node allows new witnesses to get going faster.

@inquiringtimes: "witnesses are hidden" What do you mean by that?

@reggaemuffin: no one gives out their witness ip address to not give others an incentive to try and hack it, because it has the active key of the witness, and so all funds are at risk.

that is why many have a different user name for their witness account.

@inquiringtimes: are the seed nodes like anonymous intermediary, or data scouring from the blockchain as it's being layed out?

@reggaemuffin: witnesses are writing the blockchain, seed nodes are read only versions you can show others. Much like public key and private key.

@InquiringTimes: Thank you for being patient with my ignorance. I'm learning a lot!

@reggaemuffin: No witness needs to have a seed node but it is better for the network.

@inquiringtimes: Because they make more public accesspoints for the blockchain.

@reggaemuffin: Yeah. Then there are RPC nodes, they are really beefy things you can point code to and send stuff to the blockchain
for example minnowbooster uses a RPC node to do its magic.

@InquiringTimes: I was way off there. Urban Dictionary defines RPC as a "Rocket Propelled Chainsaw" hehehe.

I'm curious to know a little more about minnowbooster

@reggaemuffin: sure thing, ask away

@inquiringtimes: On the Minnow Booster website it says: "BuildTeam Share 10.0%" for the delegation leases.

@reggaemuffin: If you pay 10 steem to get SP delegated, then we take 1 steem and give the other 9 steem to whoever fills the offer.

@inquiringtimes: ok, that makes sense. What about with the vote buying, how does that fit in to the picture?

@reggaemuffin: people delegate their sp to minnowbooster. we get SBD for upvotes, more SBD the more SP we have. each day we split the SBD between all delegators and take 10% for us

@inquiringtimes: ooooh, that's actually pretty cool. It allows the community to invest in one big account, spreads out the rewards between investors, upvote purchasers, and leasees. Additionally it helps to pay the bills of @BuildTeam to allow them to continue creating cool stuff for the blockchain.

How many people are on the Minnowbooster team?

@reggaemuffin: buildteam has 15 people roughtly at the moment.

@inquiringtimes: What else does build team do that I might not know simply from looking at their page.

@reggaemuffin: steemvoter, steemsports, mentionator and many other projects we have planned we have a token where you can invest in us.

@inquiringtimes: Any upcoming plans that you could share with me? What's the future for build team?

@reggaemuffin: we plan to build many tools and services for steem, bitshares and other blockchains like eos.

We are a team of people who want to build quality services on the blockchain and be transparent and dependable.

We are a business, so we are profit oriented. And that Profit is used to imporve the services and give everyone in the team a fair income for the time they spend on it.

@inquiringtimes: what's the extent of your involvement with MSP?

I know you have welcomebot tied to msp, and I assume you are a delegator to them.... are there other services you offer or how does that relationsihp work?

@reggaemuffin: MSP is a nice group I got into from multiple facebook and slack channels and they are pretty cool. It was always too busy for me to really participate but I am supporting them whenever the opportunity arrises.

Btw welcomebot is currently deactivated, there is too much spam going on in my opinion and the bot is not providing the value I want it to. Happy to accept help for it but I currently do not plan to have it active.

Since I made the bot there poped up many copycats so users ended up with 10 bot comments and I don't want to participate in flooding users. There were other projects that did the same thing, and since I stopped the spam is getting less and less.

I may reenable the bot with an improved message soon™ but it is no priority.

In the future, I will cover @buildteam more thoroughly.

For now I will say many thanks to @reggaemuffin for taking the time to do quite a bit more than a "short interview".

Another cool thing I just found out is that @reggamuffin is also part of @spaminator a new group working to fight abuse of the blockchain, which is awesome. According to our new "Steem White Paper" this is part of the job of witnesses (as if they needed more work ;). Here is a quote from the first @spaminator post:

"Here is what I intend to do:

Leave comments asking "real" users to please stop spamming and report them to @steemcleaners.

Find and flag comments on accounts that have more than $0.01 SBD payout that fit one of several patterns of abuse.

If asked by supporters I will show examples of patterns privately.

Inform donators of SP when the delegation is no longer needed. via @spaminator - I am The Spaminator

It's quite clear after all of this (if it wasn't clear enough already), that @reggamuffin is an invaluable member of this community. We are grateful to have you and thank you so much for your service and support!

Have fun, and Steem On!

@inquiringtimes