The last ten days on Steem have been exciting as a witness! Here is a list of what I am contributing!

Projects

1. SteemJ growth project! @sarasate spoke with me about our next steps and we have decided we need SteemJ to do three key things. First, it needs to have a peer to peer fiat exchange directly among users. This will minimize the need to use exchanges and be critical in the case of a disaster such as an exchange going down. Second, SteemJ needs to allow for jobs posted and filled because this will give us all the ability to more effectively collaborate online in our work combined with attracting freelancers and clients to Steem. Third, to support the first two, SteemJ needs profiles with more data to support making exchanges and job posts. To maximize user growth, we will post our growth project soon following the crowdfunded marketing protocol to ask for support from Steemit because we want to get as many users as possible and start with no revenue model initially.
2. Testing DTube! https://dtube.video is a huge opportunity for us on Steem and with it being new, we have few tutorials and many errors making it challenging for new users to get started. I am checking DTube daily for errors and making a getting started guide featuring a troubleshooting tutorial. I have hit so many random errors from snaps not uploading to videos never going through on uploads and fellow users have too. I am pushing the limits for the purpose of making a tutorial showing exactly how to upload different types of videos on DTube and how to get around errors. So far I have managed to get every video I have tried to upload on DTube even if it took several days to get it right. Today's video failed on Google Chrome and Safari for different reasons on my iMac on four or five attempts. After handbraking it down to 720 and uploading it on my Windows PC, the upload appeared to go through on both Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Soon I will share all of what I have learned in the shortest format possible ... which probably will be 30 minutes :)
3. Backup server! Becoming a top 50 witness and reading what happened with @furion at @furion/lessons-learned-from-failing-as-a-witness motivated me to rent a backup server to help ensure if I miss a few blocks I can automatically switch over and fix the main server. The backup server I just rented from @privex is on a different continent than my main server and has the same specs as my witness and seed. I am planning to make one of the first video tutorials showing how to get the witness up from zero! This new server brings my total hosting costs to about $540 a month for the witness, seed, and backup all of which are ready to handle a top 20 workload with the specs pasted below.
4. Top 50 witness report! This week I started a collaboration with @lexiconical to help introduce the top 50 witnesses to our community which will hopefully increase voter participation!
5. Updated to 19.2! This month I hired @someguy123 to help me manage my witness, seed, and backup because he has the technical skills I lack and two of us watching my servers is much better than one! He upgraded my servers today to 19.2 before I even saw the update was out and is available to answer questions because I collaborate with him in managing my servers to ensure I can continue educating as a witness on the technical details. Our collaboration is currently limited to his access to my servers and support via steemit.chat. All have the witness posts and guides I have done from scratch myself the same as I have done this post!
6. Delegated! In a humbling realization, I have noticed my voting mostly consists of about 25% voting my friends up, 20% of voting my own posts up, 30% in voting posts up from upvotable, and the rest voting up comments on my posts. Not only is this time consuming but I feel there are better ways to put my Steem Power to work given my responsibilities as an author and witness already. Do I really have time to do a great job in curation also? This month I am testing delegating the majority of my Steem Power out including delegations to @minnowsupport and @eco-alex to assist in curation projects combined with a delegation to @aarellanes who helps with upvotable. In addition to these delegations as gifts, I also tried renting my Steem Power out on on https://www.minnowbooster.net/market to help me educate investors seeking to get a return on Steem Power how to do the same and to help authors learn how to build influence and earnings with rented Steem Power.
7. ChainBB! After months of seeing posts about @jesta's ChainBB at https://beta.chainbb.com/, I am learning more about ChainBB and planning to do several posts!
8. Local Steem meetups! Last month I hosted the first Steem meetup in the USA as seen at @jerrybanfield/first-florida-steem-meetup-photos-and-video. More meetups in Saint Petersburg, Florida and Orlando, Florida were requested by participants along with those unable to attend the first one. I am beginning the planning for two more local meetups in Florida during 2017. Posts seeking agreement on dates will follow shortly!
9. Steem taxes! After my initially ultra conservative tax payment system which matches accounting on websites like Coinbase, I am working on an updated Steem tax payment system that is simple and easy to use. The idea is to only report what is sold out of Steem because doing income on the day received and then capital gains both creates a ton of extra work in tracking Steem Power and SBD every single day while potentially creating a big overpayment if the price of Steem goes to 0 at the benefit of allowing capital gains if it goes to the moon. The IRS has not made it clear exactly what is absolutely right for taxation of Steem, Steem Power, and SBD rewards meaning we are all just guessing at this point. I am going to take the most reasonable guess to report income I receive back in USD on the day I receive it and if I need to change it, I will be happy to adjust the difference.
10. Autovoters! With the clear way to maximize curation being to get good autovoters setup, I am beginning research into Autosteem and steemvoter to see which is best while comparing the benefits and liabilities of autovotes versus manual votes.
11. Fully voted! I finally made the last of my 30 of my own witness votes and will consistently make posts explaining why I am voting for each witness going forward.

Server Specs

My witness server, seed, and backup all have the following:

64GB DDR4 RAM
Intel Xeon E5-2630 (6c/12t)
2x 240GB SSDs
1Gbit/s

Thank you!

I am very grateful to now be receiving 23 blocks a day thanks especially to a vote from @clayop for me as a witness this week which landed me in the top 50! Here are my witness details from https://steemd.com/@jerrybanfield with no new missed blocks during the last 10 days.

Guides

Here are the witness guides I have made in my first two months to help make it easier for any new witness to learn how to join us!

1. Get a Steem Witness + Seed Online Today with These Ubuntu Linux Commands at @jerrybanfield/get-a-steem-witness-seed-online-today-with-these-ubuntu-linux-commands
2. Steem Witness Basic Training at @jerrybanfield/steem-witness-basic-training
3. Launch a Steem Witness Today at @jerrybanfield/launch-a-steem-witness-today
4. How to Start Getting Steem Witness Votes at @jerrybanfield/how-to-start-getting-steem-witness-votes

Votes

I am voting for the witnesses listed below at 296.643 MV.

@adamm
@aggroed
@blocktrades
@busy.witness
@chainsquad.com
@clayop
@curie
@drakos
@followbtcnews
@furion
@good-karma
@gtg
@jerrybanfield
@jesta
@klye
@krnel
@lukestokes.mhth
@moisesmcardona
@netuoso
@personzzz
@pfunk
@riverhead
@roadscape
@roelandp
@someguy123
@swelker101
@teamsteem
@thecryptodrive
@wackou
@xeldal

I review my witness votes each week and make adjustments based both on contributions I see and on witness basics such as staying updated with the newest version and quickly correcting missed blocks as I did after I missed my first last month and am hoping to be best prepared for soon with a backup server. Recently I removed several witnesses that were not updated to the current version of Steem with the help of https://witstats.steemliberator.com/index.

My votes are mostly for the top witnesses giving a lot to our community while a few of my votes are helping newer witnesses have the chance to level up further. I would appreciate if witnesses consistently provided transparency in witness updates as to how votes are chosen and I will seek to continue to improve this myself in future posts which provide more details about what specific witnesses do and therefore why I am voting for them.

When we see witnesses especially in the top voting for other witnesses that are offline or running an old version of Steem and missing blocks, it lowers the perception of fairness in witness votes to the community and discourages new witnesses from trying. Many of us currently have votes for witnesses disabled or running Steem 19.0 or older as seen in several recent witness posts. Would any of us like to make a post showing the current witness votes for all top 50 witnesses by those updated, outdated, and disabled because I think we would all benefit from seeing this data in a simple format?

Thank you again!

Thank you for reading my second witness update! Every day I think about how to be of greatest service and am working to make Steem the divine gift we need it to be for forgiveness and freedom in this world! I am very grateful after two months as a witness to have 550 votes today especially from these top 7 upvoters from https://steemdb.com/@jerrybanfield/witness.

Love,
Jerry Banfield

PS: Witness votes are the most powerful votes we make on Steem because one vote for a witness lasts indefinitely! Would you please make a vote for jerrybanfield as a witness or set jerrybanfield as a proxy to handle all witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because when we make our votes, we feel in control of our future together? Thank you to the 550 accounts voting for me as a witness and the 184.2M VESTS assigned from users trusting me to make all witness votes by setting me as proxy!

Thank you to @barrysamways for drawing this image and providing a complete tutorial showing how he did it