Question For Witnesses

in #witness6 years ago

Witnesses are the backbone of our STEEM. Without good witnesses, everything would fall apart. They are our politicians as they decide what rules get implemented and what don't(done as accepting/rejecting hardforks). We vote them into power. Those with more SP make more of a difference with their vote. But every vote matters. Your 100 SP might be the deciding factor on wether a witness gets moved up a rank or not.

Now HF20 caused a lot of people to look at who they were voting for and especially me. I decided that there were some questions that I would like to have answered by our lovely witnesses before I decided to recast my votes. I compiled a list of a few questions that I would like to get the answer to. Not all are from me, I asked around for some things that others wanted to know as well. Some are pretty easy and can be verified while others are witnesses opinions that I want to understand. I'm going to be using the responses to this to see who I want to vote for and hope that others use the information to make their own decision as well.


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1. Why did you decide to become a witness?


2. Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?


3. HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that?


4. What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?


5. Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?


6. Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?


7. Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.


8. Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read whats happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?


9. STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?


10. Why do you deserver to become the top witness?

Idea from @steemitqa.


No matter your rank of witness, I want to hear your answer. You might be the person that I've been looking for and I agree with. Thank to all those who answer.
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  1. Why did you decide to become a witness?
    My reason for becoming a witness was to secure the network that I am building on. Steem needs witnesses that care, have reliable infrastructure and review new changes before they deploy them. A year and a half later, I am still reviewing code (and now actually coding for the Steem blockchain).

  2. Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?
    I have lately started the SteemCommunity Initiative to get more people to work on the Steem codebase itself. I submitted multiple small pull requests already but they are not yet reviewed. So without further ado I spend a good chunk of yesterday to do a bigger patch that removes some obsolete code. A blockchain developer commented out the old bandwidth code, but in doing so introduced bugs in multiple apis. So I went in and checked all parts that depend on this code. Then created tests for the part that broke (as before tests did not notice a failure) and removed the old bandwidth and all its references. This touched many files and I spend a lot of time compiling, testing and reading code. But it was worth it, as now Steem unit tests cover more code and replays are faster. I am currently waiting for reviewers and will probably clean up my code a bit today. (We need reviewers confident in C++, if you know them, send them my way)

  3. HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that?
    I am actively working on fixing this issue with my SteemCommunity Initiative and with kicking off the discussion for Hard Fork Adoption Requirements. My current survey of Steem unit tests shows that not much code is actually tested properly and I think that is an area I want to improve upon. My newest pull request to Steem tests almost all code I touched and improves the overall testing coverage. That way with every new code added there will be more tests to it. This can definitely help in catching bugs automatically and will save a lot of time in development.
    image.png

  4. What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?
    I have onboarded many friends so far, got my tax advisor to Steem and am always sharing relevant articles. I support promotion initiatives like the thunderclaps or the social media blast and am pitching Steem to investors. With BuildTeam, we offer businesses support in building on the Steem blockchain and are always on the lookout for cooperations. So far we have promoted Steem on billboards, liasoned with exchanges and important businesses and supported several ICOs in using Steem for their public voice. And I am open to expand on this whenever possible.

  5. Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?
    my own curation guild which is following great authors form multiple communities and supports initiatives with upvotes and exposure. I am helping many communities in all the ways I can. I started myself in the Whaleshares community and wanted to give back on the support I got there. I am a big supporter of the @googlyeyes community, I delegate 10k SP to @steemstem and support @utopian is much as I can (I once helped out as a moderator, but that was not my core skill). I am supporting the german (DACH) community and am generally available for all questions. My core rule is that if someone mentions me on discord or Steem, I will see it and respond. So if someone has a complicated witness question I am always there. I have always relayed critical information to communities, for example when the HF20 troubles happened, I supported the communities I participate in and gave them insights into what was going on which calmed many down. I am running

  6. Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?
    I would say yes! I was unsure in the beginning because I so far do not have a lot of experience with C++ and it is a language that is not very forgiving if one is not very proficient in it. But over the last years I learned many things from very proficient C++ coders at my university and when yesterday I tried myself in developing a patch, I was able to understand the concepts used in the code. That means I feel confident to review code that other people write. And with my SteemCommunity Initiative I plan to review all code the the steemit team develops again when merging it back to our fork. That way code is reviewed before it becomes a big blob of madness.

  7. Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.
    I have developed many things so far. Did a few minor things like the whaleshares page or steeminvest back in the day. Then I started Minnowbooster as a goal to build a nice bot that is fair and easy to use. It evolved to me cofounding BuildTeam and overseeing development of Steemvoter, Quicksteem and many other apps. I helped other developers out with small patches and plant to expand on that when opportunities arise. But currently I am more focused on developing for the Steem blockchain itself.

  8. Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read whats happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?
    I agree that communication was a problem. In my opinion it is getting better, but is still not at a point where I would say it is good. Regarding private witness channels, I think a good setup would be a read only channel where only dedicated witnesses (selected by the other witnesses) are allowed to write, as a means to reduce noise. There were many discussions around creating such a setup and it again comes to no one is doing it so in my opinion, if someone starts creating such a channel, then I would adopt it. There are merits for secret channels, for example in scenarios like a chain freeze, where information should not leak out, as it might put the chain at risk. But such events happen rarely and most decisions should happen in public forums. I am open to hearing all proposals that want to improve the situation. But that also requires mindful readers who don't scream conspiracy theory at every word said ;)

  9. STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?
    I think that Steemit Inc. is doing a good job in developing the things they do. But I disagree with them being the only ones who should develop for steem. That would make it a single point of failure. I think we developers should work on the Steem code whenever we can and support Steemit Inc. and the community by implementing much wanted features ourselves. Not all witnesses code. Not all developers are witnesses. So I would say that witnesses should be able to test changes and have criteria as to what they want from a change. Developers should review changes and code themselves. And if someone is both a witness and blockchain developer, then that is twice as nice. The more people using a code, the more chance there is that bugs are spotted. And I think that if we move into a situation where there is put more focus on open source blockchain development then developers can work on Steem itself and be funded by @utopian-io. That would be my dream.

  10. Why do you deserver to become the top witness?

    I already said in my Hard Fork Adoption Requirements what I will do when I am a top20 witness and it is up to the voters to decide if that is something they consider worth voting for. I am grateful for every vote and happy to help everyone who needs me, just mention me if you have any questions. Deserve is a hard word. That would reek entitlement. I check all the boxes I personally have for a top witness and think that being in the top20 is something that would be appropriate based on what I do for Steem. But I don't deserve anything. I have never tried to get much into the politics myself and rather have others witness my work and so far, I have many users who liked what I do for Steem and pitch me to their followers. Lately @taskmaster4450 wrote a really nice piece about why to vote me https://steempeak.com/busy/@taskmaster4450/witness-spotlight-reggaemuffin

Thank you @reggaemuffin for all you do as a witness. Keep giving, keep going and keep growing I will be following you.

  1. Why did you decide to become a witness?

It was a natural step, it really was. After working my behind off for the almost a year in a community project, trying to help create a middle class for the STEEM ecosystem, we reached a point were scalability was an issue, we needed to be able to continue the mission at hand, and becoming a witness became the only viable way we could pull it off.

  1. Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?

Not to STEEM at the moment, but yes to condenser. Within our community witness team we are blessed to have some talented developers, and hope to get more and more involved in the way of code contributions as time progresses.

  1. HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that? (Idea from @steemitqa.)

We've decided to get heavily involved with the testing stages of any upcoming implementation. Prior to the fork we did run some tests on the testnet, but could have done a way better job in communicating some of the issues we found.

Within our team we've made a commitment to become as active as possible on this aspect of STEEM for any upcoming updates, as we are completely aware that that we cannot allow this to happen ever again.

  1. What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?

The community puts out content on different platforms every single week, a way of soft promoting STEEM. Personally, I've been promoting STEEM almost since the beginning of my Steemian career across all social media, and have reached out to plenty of youtubers in my time here. I've been lucky enough to bring more than a few recognizable names. Some have stuck around, and of course some have not.

  1. Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?

@helpie is all about this, the central focus of @helpie is empower people, and help them one day run their own communities. So literally, this has been the one thing we've been working on almost since day one.

  1. Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?

Not personally, but as I've said before within the team, we have talented coders. This however is something we are going to continue to improve on, as one of the short to midterm goals for @helpie is to find more talent on this very department.

  1. Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.

Well, the whole @helpie initiative completely eats, breathes and sleeps STEEM. The ethos might be focused on people, the value of human contribution and community ( people > money) but the backbone of the initiative was edificed on the STEEM blockchain.

  1. Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read whats happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?

I think it's important to have a private slack, as many sensitive things get shared on there that should never be public. Think about security issues that are being solved, and the potential for a bad actor to take advantage of this type of information being public as an example.

However, I won't say that communication is perfect, and have had many conversations with many in positions of leadership about this very issue. I think the STEEM chat are channels, but imo the directives to be followed, and the public notices, should have more of an official tinge.

To me the solution is to create a coalition among top leadership just for this very purpose, and possibly do so in coordination with Steemit Inc. This was we would not have long periods of silence in trialing times ever again.

  1. STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?

It is my personal believe that the more we grow, the more we need to remove things from Steemit Inc's plate. To me it makes all the sense in the world to come up with budgets for development for this blockchain, in very much the way Dash handles it and for this process to have stake weighted democratic underpinnings, as to choose the right direction. Those with skin in the game, would be focused in changes and updates that would benefit the ecosystem's valuation the most.

This idea currently does not seem implementable, but a slow progression towards it makes the most sense to me. One of the intentions we have within @helpie is to grow a development team that can contribute significantly to STEEM's code. I fully expect to allocate funds for this very purpose in the near future.

  1. Why do you deserve to become the top witness?

I would never say I do, even if @helpie was 2,3 more years into it's mission. It might be old school of me, possibly unpragmatic, but I believe positions are earned slowly, when value becomes implicit.

Will we ever reach the top 20? I have no clue, but it's never been a condition to do our best, not even a consideration for us.

It is my personal believe that the more we grow, the more we need to remove things from Steemit Inc's plate. To me it makes all the sense in the world to come up with budgets for development for this blockchain [...]

What? So you're pursuing the path to true decentralization. How could I not vote for you. Thank you.

I'm honored answering these 10 questions.


1.) Why did you decide to become a witness?

I've quit my day job and focused on building a business on Steem 14 months ago. 4 months after doing that, I decided to become a witness as this brought me even closer on working with Steem. I believe in Steem and being a witness gives me the ability to influence the direction Steem takes, besides providing a secure infrastructure for it.

2.) Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?

Not yet. I've invested most of my time building software and business on Steem. But if you look at my blog right now, you'll see that I'm actively working on contributing.

3.) HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that?

Code review, testing and if needed providing a witness node for testnet - but honestly, this is more about having a standard of deploying code on witness nodes only if standards are met. Steemit Inc. devs are very capable and experienced.

4.) What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?

I've put my focus on developing, building businesses,
supporting communities and blogging about important topics - but I'm not a marketer.

5.) Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?

I've delegated 26,000+ SP to communities (check: https://therealwolf.me) and I'm also in preparations for launching my own community. More info about that soon :)

6.) Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?

Working 14 months with Steem gave me a pretty good understanding of how Steem works and how to utilize the blockchain. While my initial programming knowledge is in C#, I've worked the last months primarily with Javascript. And I've just started working directly with the code (c++) and I'd rather take a step back and be humble since the code is on a serious and high level.

7.) Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.

I've developed:

And a lot more in the making.

8.) Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read what's happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?

I believe that communication is very important and there has to be a better information flow towards the general public and backup witnesses.

Now with that said, not all knowledge is without risk. Steem is no joke - it's a project worth upwards of 200 Million dollars (even reached 10x of that) and sometimes having discussions in private is important, simply to protect the blockchain and our funds.

9.) STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?

Steemit Inc. has, of course, a huge stake in Steem and thus an incentive and a responsibility to improve their investment. But I'm very sure that Steemit Inc. has no problems of community developers making PRs. There is enough work to be done.

But as I said before, the source-code of Steem is no joke and all changes need to be reviewed by experienced developers (mvandeberg & co.), which costs time. Which means: just because someone does work for Steem, doesn't mean it's effective.

That's why I will take my time diving into the code before I submit PRs which might create more work for mvandeberg & co. as if they'd do it themselves.

10.) Why do you deserve to become the top witness?

Tricky question. I don't deserve anything per-se. While I've worked literally my arse off the last 14 months, growing from plankton to midsize orca and becoming a much better developer - I'm very grateful for the possibilities. And even being a TOP 32 witness is amazing and I'm proud of this fact.

Now with that said, I do believe that I have what it takes to be a TOP20 witness. And while there are a few things I'm able to do with a TOP20 witness budget, my work ethic doesn't change whether I'm a consensus witness or not.

I will always give my very best for Steem


Thank you for asking these questions and giving us witnesses a platform, @rishi556!

I will try to answer all questions:

  1. I decided to become a witness, because I really like and care about STEEM.

  2. I found an issue which leads to a fix (my github name is holgern): https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/2972

  3. I will check the changes and read the source code. I will also doing tests on the test net

  4. Noting yet

  5. I delegating 500 SP to opencomedymic and 5000 SP to steem-ua. I'm developing for steembasicincome.
    I'm running a weekly curation contest to encourage curation (last post)

  6. I'm a c++ developer, so I understand the source code.

  7. Yes, I'm the developer of beem. beem is python library for beem. I developed also https://beempy.com, a website where everyone can check the RC costs of important operations as a comment, vote, transfer, custom_json, ..

  8. I think it is fine that the channel is private in order to prevent price manipulation and other attacks when critical things happen to the steem blockchain. The talk in there is mostly very technical. When something happens as the bugs in HF20, there should be a detailed post about it from steemitblog.

  9. I think it is a shared responsibility. The dev from steemit are doing a good job and have all the tools for developing. The witnesses participating by writing issues, reading the source code and testing new code. I'm doing my part in replacing python-steem by beem.

  10. I don't know If I deserve it to be a top20 witness. I'm doing what I can to support steem and to develop usefull tools for it.

Thank you for your answer, I just voted for your witness :)

Haven't used beem yet, but I used steempy. Heard beem is better so I might give it a go when I get back on python. Thanks for developing for @ steembasicincome, they are one of my favorite groups out here.

steembasicincome ?Hi @rishi556, I'm @checky ! While checking the mentions made in this comment I noticed that @steembasicincone doesn't exist on Steem. Did you mean to write @

If you found this comment useful, consider upvoting it to help keep this bot running. You can see a list of all available commands by replying with !help.

Ah thanks.

1. Why did you decide to become a witness?

I had always been fascinated with the witnesses since I initially joined. I had been contributing to the platform in many ways prior to launching a witness campaign, and at the point I decided to run it just seemed like a natural progression. The idea of being able to make a profit if I started producing enough blocks to cover the cost of my witness nodes was part of the initial draw as well :)

2. Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?

Yes. I have made several minor contributions (small bug fixes, config updates, etc.) which can be found here.

I also submitted two changes that were part of the last hardfork, both of which changed the way SBD is handled:

3. HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that?
Here is my plan to address what happened:
@timcliff's Witness Hardfork Approval Standards v0.1

4. What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?

I have run several external promotions including the SteemBlast campaign.

5. Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?

I delegate SP to five projects that I believe are helping to grow the community and ecosystem: @goldenproject, @magiccleatus, @minnowsupport, @spaminator, and @witnesspage.

6. Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?

Yes. Probably more than most, but still only to a limited extent.

7. Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.

I have developed quite a few changes for various Steem projects, including many condenser (steemit.com). Two of the more notable ones are the "Welcome Page" and "FAQ", both of which I worked on in collaboration with other witnesses. I also run SteemEconomy.com, which is a directory of all the business that accept STEEM/SBD as a form of payment.

8. Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read whats happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?

If community members want to know what witnesses positions are on various issues, they should ask them directly. If they don't get the responses they expect/want, they have the right to change their votes accordingly.

9. STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?

The responsibility for developing code should rightfully fall on the development team. Witnesses can (and should) be encouraged to contribute to development, but I would consider witnesses that do that to be going "above and beyond the call of duty".

It would be great to reach a point where more development was done by "outside" parties (those other than Steemit, Inc.) but right now there is a huge amount of knowledge and skills that are missing from those on the "outside" to be able to do it effectively.

10. Why do you deserve to become the top witness?

I try to let my actions speak for themselves. I consider myself to be an active witness who does a lot to advance the blockchain, community, and ecosystem in a positive direction.

  1. We decided to run a witness because we wanted to support the network and we think we're highly qualified as a witness, especially when there are problems.

  2. We wrote one of the key pieces of the Steem code: the peer-to-peer network layer that enables steemd nodes to communicate with each other (i.e. share transactions and blocks). This code was originally written for the graphene blockchain library and re-used in the Steem codebase and other graphene-based chains, so it's actually used in a number of active blockchains nowadays. We've also developed other code for steem under various contracts.

  3. It's actually pretty challenging for witnesses to detect most code bugs in the Steem code ahead of time. To do a good job, the testers should really be interacting daily or at least weekly with the programmers doing the code as they need to understand the nitty gritty details in order to make good tests. This really doesn't fit with Steemit's current coding model, so I really feel the onus is on Steemit to up their testing game. About the best I think we could do as witnesses is ask to see what tests they've created and the results, then try to make a judgement about if the testing is adequate. Of course, we can also look at the code, etc, but it's unlikely that such an examination will detect anything Steemit hasn't already checked.

  4. We promote it a lot on our web site: https://blocktrades.us. And indirectly through any marketing that leads people to our site. We also actively upvote/fund reasonable proposals that people make to do external promotion of the Steem blockchain.

  5. We have and do support various communities via targeted upvoting, especially when they are just getting started. We have also occasionally delegated steem power to such communities.

  6. As long term graphene coders, we're about as qualified as anyone is to read the Steem codebase. We have a large team of experienced C++ coders (our most experienced guys have 20 -30 years experience in C++) who've worked on extremely challening code.

  7. We've developed various Steem-based applications, but we haven't released them for public use yet. The ones that come to mind off hand are a messaging system that allows chat/email over the Steem blockchain and an accounting system that can analyze Steem wallet transactions for tax purposes (but this is part of a much larger system). We also have a prototype vote bot that we've never really used.

  8. Communication from Steemit is a real problem, but I don't real feel the same thing is true of the witnesses. The solution to this problem, IMO, is for Steemit to post more often.
    So I guess I don't think it's a great idea, as I think it's just likely to stifle honest dialog in the channel if witnesses feel like they have to monitor every word they say.
    The discussions aren't really that fascinating most of the the time and generally it seems like anytime there's an idea that gets any traction in the group, one witness or another winds up making a post about it to get the opinions of the wider Steem world. Some witnesses I would say are pretty much elected based on their work publishing such ideas on the blockchain (which is very reasonable to me).
    That said, I'd be fine if the discussion itself was made readable, it's not a big deal to me one way or the other, and maybe it would end the conspiracy theories that seem to arise around the channel (or probably not, since I think there would just be the claim made next that there's another more secret channel, lol). So probably it's a pointless exercise.
    Oh, one other issue is that sometimes there are real security issues discussed in that channel (i.e. a zero-day bug that's not yet patched). There really needs to be a secure chat channel for such communication to prevent hackers from taking advantage of that kind of information before witnesses can coordinate to update their code. This is obviously a rare situation, but it does happen.

  9. Steemit has the funding and most of the experienced steem developers (well, we're probably the one exception to that rule).
    Witness pay was cut along time ago to the point where it's really not practical for witnesses to pay for programming teams. Even when our team was doing work on the Steem blockchain, it was under contract with Steemit itself, as our witness pay simply couldn't cover the programmer's salaries.

  10. We have the personnel and experience to do the main tasks that I think witnesses can reasonably do: 1) produce blocks, 2) respond to emergencies, and 3) evaluate proposals for new features in the blockchain and then put pressure on Steemit when necessary to make sure inputs from outside Steemit are properly considered when adding new features and making changes to blockchain economics.

Thanks for the response. I think that you guys really changed my mind on the private chat. I used to believe that it being read only should be enacted but when you said:

Oh, one other issue is that sometimes there are real security issues discussed in that channel (i.e. a zero-day bug that's not yet patched). There really needs to be a secure chat channel for such communication to prevent hackers from taking advantage of that kind of information before witnesses can coordinate to update their code.

I fully knew that keeping it private would be the best. I really like that you have the personnel and experience to keep the blockchain in a great state. And your site has been my favorite exchange for anything steem related. Thanks for your great work.

We've developed various Steem-based applications, but we haven't released them for public use yet. The ones that come to mind off hand are a messaging system that allows chat/email over the Steem blockchain and an accounting system that can analyze Steem wallet transactions for tax purposes (but this is part of a much larger system). We also have a prototype vote bot that we've never really used.

This sounds exactly what me and @bsameep might have written !

Why did you decide to become a witness?

Its here: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@bobinson/witness-update

Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?

No. Though Few issues were reported. Tinman also is applicable. That being said, I am working on smart contracts and quite familiar with the code base.

HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that?
Idea from @steemitqa.

Was able to look into the code and find the bug. I don't think, there will ever be anything more than reporting possible. This done during the freeze prior to HF20 too. Why did STEEM blockchain froze ?

What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?

a) https://steemit.com/blockchain/@bobinson/blockchain-meetup-in-bangalore-second-edition

b) Presented STEEM as the alternate to private blockchain based on hyperledger for a disaster relief operation and designed the architecture and completed proof of concept. Dropped after seeing the inconsistency of the public chain. Details were shared earlier.

c) designing a 3 month course for blockchain programming and including STEEM along with BTC and ETH.

d) A conference paper in Tokyo Japan on "A novel approach on interchain communication" will use STEEM as the proof of concept in the demo.

Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?

@inidaunited & occassional communication with Airhawk project which uses STEEM in the most innovative way IMHO.

Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?

until version 0.19.5 yes. Learning changes after 0.19.6. steem-python, tinman are 2 other important tools one should now. (steemjs too!)

Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.

few tools, bots etc.

Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read whats happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?

if you are talking about the steem.chat channel, its open. I have no clue about any other channels.

STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?

Shared responsibility IMHO.

Why do you deserver to become the top witness?

I don't deserve to be a top 17 witness as I will never learn how to influence people and keep people happy. :-)

First, I'd like to give some clarifications:

  • Not all witnesses have decision power, only the top 20 witnesses do.
  • Witnesses don't get to decide what is getting implemented, Steemit Inc does. Witnesses (especially top20), however, do discuss with Steemit Inc developers in regards of what is being implemented and they do have their choice on whether what has been implemented will get installed and run on their witness servers.
  • Witnesses can submit code change but Steemit Inc will be the one accepting or rejecting the change

And for context, I’m ranked 116, so I'm not sure how valuable my answers will be to you.

To your questions:

Why did you decide to become a witness?
It was only 1 months after I joined Steemit that I started to launch my witness server. The initial reasons were because I'm a developer and I'm familiar with setting up and maintaining servers. As for many, I joined Steemit with an initial intention got make money and running a witness seemed to me like a good investment. But just like for author and curation reward, I soon discovered that it was not as simple as I thought and I was actually paying more for renting the server than I received from the blocks at my rank. For a while Is as receiving less than 1 steem per day and today it has increased to just over 3 steem per day. But I still have to pay monthly for my server and every time there is an update I have to spend time doing it and for a hardfork this can take several days. What makes me stay despite the loss is that I get to learn more about the blockchain and help the network.

Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?
I haven't made any contributions to the STEEM code base yet. I'm not a C/C++ developer. My previous experience of C/C++ does allow me to do a little bit of code review but I need to improve on this side of things.

HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that?
I will do code review to the limits of my knowledge and perform tests where possible. But the producer reward I receive is not enough for me to invest into some more infrastructure for testing.

What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?
To be honest, nothing worth mentioning.

Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?

Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?
Probably not. I can review local changes but won’t be able to tell what are their impact on the rest of the codebase.

Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.
Yes I have. As mentioned above, I have created a Vietnamese community which uses a Discord/Steem bot to support the members. I've also created few softwares, the main ones being:

Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read whats happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?
Even backup witnesses, like me, don't have access to that private channel. I think all witnesses should at least have access to that channel in READ-ONLY in order to follow up with what's going on. Whether it should be public or not is another matter, for security reasons this should probably stay restricted. But there should be a public channel for announcements and communication from Steemit Inc.

Meanwhile, the public can access these public witness channels:

STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?
I personally don't think witnesses need to be responsible for the development. They can participate if they want and have time but that's different to their duty. I see witnesses more as system admins making sure that the network is functioning properly and taking responsibility of checking what we install on our servers. But ideally, Steemit Inc should not be the only one to develop for the blockchain. The code is available on GitHub and anyone with enough skills can submit code changes.

Why do you deserver to become the top witness?
My lack of C++ skills and knowledge of the STEEM code base wouldn't allow me to properly assess the STEEM code, so I'm a rather weak candidate. Does this prevent me from being a good witness (backup)? No. I do have enough knowledge on how the software work and how to maintain my server and get smooth udpates and I can develop other things. I hope that with time my skills and knowledge will increase.

On a non technical side, I'm also very accessible and don't mind spending time sharing my knowledge with other Steemians, I also post content that are not just related to crypto or witnessing (gardening, composting, music etc...).

Not all witnesses have decision power, only the top 20 witnesses do.

And top 17 decides a hard fork ....

No, only 17 of the top 20 need to approve HF, it doesn't matter what rank they are in as long as they are top 20.

#define STEEM_MAX_WITNESSES 21

#define STEEM_HARDFORK_REQUIRED_WITNESSES 17 // 17 of the 21 dpos witnesses (20 elected and 1 virtual time) required for hardfork. This guarantees 75% participation on all subsequent rounds.

So it is more like 16 + 1 out of top 21 at any point in time.

reference: https://github.com/steemit/steem/blob/master/libraries/protocol/include/steem/protocol/config.hpp

Thanks for your response. Your response even at your rank is important because you might have the requirements that someone has and vote for you.

Hi @rishi556!


Your UA account score is currently 3.190 which ranks you at #8362 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has dropped 79 places in the last three days (old rank 8283).Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!

In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 291 contributions, your post is ranked at #260.

Evaluation of your UA score:
  • You're on the right track, try to gather more followers.
  • The readers like your work!
  • Try to work on user engagement: the more people that interact with you via the comments, the higher your UA score!

Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server

Please note, this is not the view of the @curie witness, which I am the operator of. All of the views in this post are my own and in line with why I run my personal witness under my @markangeltrueman account.

1. Why did you decide to become a witness?

I guess the reasons are twofold.

Firstly, of course, there is the financial side of things. I have a lot of ideas and existing projects for various Steem communities that I would like to run or currently run. Of course, running these projects on servers costs money and I am trying to stick to a plan that witness earnings should pay for these projects and that other earnings from posts and my curie work will be powered up and invested in the platform.

Secondly, I believe that I make a great custodian of the Steem blockchain. Not only do I have 20 years experience in developing enterprise systems, I have spent the last 5 years running third line support for one of the largest online payments companies in the world. That involves being responsible for over 200 individual Linux machines running on virtualized environments along with all of the network, application and os support that comes with it. I am ITIL certified so know how to handle and manage incidents and change, something I do on a daily basis.

2. Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?

Not yet. However, there are only a handful of witnesses that have. It is something that needs to change however and I fully intend to brush up on my C++ skills and start making PRs for both blockchain code and possibly condenser (even though it appears that condenser isn't high on the priority list for Steemit Inc)

3. HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that?

Learning about the codebase and being able to run nodes on the Testnet has come to the forefront of witness requirements post HF20. I have recently started to get a personal testing node built on my iMac (a post will be forthcoming on this) in order to facilitate my interest in pre-production testing.

Bugs are always going to slip through the net, that's just part of development (I'd be out of a job if they didn't), but ensuring a higher level of unit test code coverage (I'm not sure what level of unit testing/coverage Steem currently has), as well as possibly implementing some kind of Selenium-based front end testing seems like a good place to start. A lot of the issues would have been found by just having something automated that just clicks around on steemit.com for a while.

4. What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?

Other than continuing to tell my close friends how awesome it is and getting some of them on board, not a lot. I'm not a social person in that respect, so doing things like conferences and presentations is not my thing at all.

5. Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?

Yes, this is where my passion lies. I voluntarily run the Curie witness and am an active member of that community. I am a co-founder of c-squared, one of the fastest growing curation communities on the blockchain. I have written numerous discord bots for both of these communities, as well as developing becquerel.io for curie which replaced Streemian as their post submission platform just under 6 months ago.

I am also in the process of starting my own photography tag, under the @photomag account for which I reward great photographers with a small curie "direct-follow vote". I've also started hanging out in Helpie a bit, but I have so much going on with the others to really make that stick at the moment.

I also recently offered up a total of 1000 SP in delegation to 10 minnows who are still struggling to post under RC restrictions.

6. Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?

Not yet, but I am going on the learning experience as we speak. I used to code in C++, and the codebases that I'm used to are much larger and more complicated than Steem, so I should be on a good footing.

7. Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.

becquerel.io for curie which is used daily by all the curators and reviewers in curie.Yeah, as above, I co-founded @c-squared, have written discord bots to aid that community in upvoting and commenting on posts directly from our discord server. I have created feeds of posts withing discord and my bot posts the @c-cubed daily curation post. My biggest project is

8. Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read what's happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?

To be perfectly honest, you aren't missing much :) When the shit hits the fan though (like it did at times during HF20) all you want are the witnesses who are responsible for producing 95% of the blocks to be working on getting things fixed without any interruption or outside influences. You put your trust in the top 20 by voting for them, so trust them to get the work done by communicating with each other in the "private witness channel". There is plenty of public witness information in steem.chat and in the witness updates.

9. STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?

I think that top 20 witnesses who are being compensated and not putting all of their producer rewards back into the platform (ie, are taking some as a "paycheck") should be able to find the time to get more involved in this side of things. For me, as a witness at around position 100 and a full-time job that takes up 90 hours of my week at times, I just get involved as much as I can with not just the witnessing side of things, but the community and general Steem development.

10. Why do you deserve to become the top witness?

I don't think it's a case of deserving. You have to earn it. It's not currently my main goal to become a top 20 witness (not that I'd have a chance), just to be able to make my blocks count by providing a reliable node and use any SP that I receive in producer rewards to support my own personal infrastructure, other communities and my own development.

Also posted here.. https://steemit.com/witness-category/@markangeltrueman/witness-update-october-2018-a-response-to-rishi556

I will answer for two of us because our witness team contains 2 people. I see all the top witnesses answering so I'm little scared as our ranking is ~350 atm (we started our Witness couple days ago), but as u said

"No matter your rank of witness, I want to hear your answer."


1. Why did you decide to become a witness?
We won't lie Steemit is our addiction. We hate being controlled by social media like fb/instagram etc. Thats why we love blockchain idea because its decentralized. The second reason is that Steem is a very stable crypto-currency and we believe that this is the future. Every day we saw how witnesses could make others smile on their faces. They were an inspiration for us. We have never met such an active and helpful community as on Steemit. We want to be a bigger part of the community, we appreciate all people who supported us and we also want to be able to give something more to community.
2. Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?

No. Unfortunately we are not a C++ developers.


3. HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that?

Im not expecting us to get into the top20 so for now its not in our hands. However I would say that communication and testing things on test net is the priority.


4. What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?

First thing I wanted to say is that we found Steemit through dlive. We hardly believed that streaming service is what Steemit blockchain needs. We was promoting it through all the possible social media. Now when dlive fucked up us, we trying to bring more people on Steemit itself and new streaming platform @vimm. We are from Poland and because of us most polish dudes stayed on Steemit/Vimm instead of following Lino.


5. Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?

For now we dont have that much SP for delegate to communities but with whole our hearts we support @steemgc as its great Gaming Community, our upvote value is ~0,20$ on my non-witness acc,but we trying to curate people as much as we can, mainly on @vimm. We planning to make gaming tournaments,giveaways,contests but it will all take a time. For now we doing what we can.


6. Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?

Probably not. As we said we are not a C++ developers.


7. Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.

Not yet.


8. Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read whats happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?

If community members want to know what witnesses positions are on various issues, they should ask them directly also great option is to follow witnesses on Steemit and steemitblog as they often post updates etc.


9. STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?

I think its shared responsibility. Both sides should be doing their best to prevent any issues.


10. Why do you deserve to become the top witness?

I think its in community hands. Community will decide which rank we should be. However we will do our best to make people happy.

1. Why did you decide to become a witness?

Out of curiosity. Running your own set of nodes is a great opportunity to learn about the inner workings of the platform. Also, given my field of expertise, I hoped that I could be of value to the Steem platform.

2. Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?

Yes. Contributions mean not only making pull requests but also finding issues.
My contributions, however, are usually far from changes at the conceptual level. In most cases, they are related to security, reliability, and performance.
After a quick look at GitHub, I can tell you that I’ve made 12 PRs to the core Steem codebase with some minor security/stability fixes, docs; resource usage, seed updates, but also dozens of issues (38 closed) that were solved and therefore helped improve Steem.

3. HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that?

There was already a discussion on Sunday on the #witness channel at steem.chat:

Here’s a simple algorithm posted by @ats-david (aka @ats-witness):

  • Is there a problem in need of a fix? If no, then no hard fork is necessary. If yes...
  • Does proposed change solve the specific problem? If no, reject it. If yes...
  • Has the new code been audited? If no, reject it. If yes...
  • Has the new code been tested? If no, reject it. If yes...
  • And changes have been made, audit and test it again.
  • If everything looks good and you like the proposed change, then accept the hard fork.

That should be a basic universal standard for witnesses.

The worst thing is that I did all the steps.

I had some doubts and uncertainty, and of course you can always dig deeper (certainly deep enough to notice the difference between seconds and hours!) and work harder to have less uncertainty

So I guess I need to improve this uncertainty to a level that is acceptable

Also, I made one mistake:
We received a good question before the scheduled HF20 date:
"What will we do, if RC does not work as expected?"
RC was the most risky part but also a non-consensus one, so it was highly underestimated.

The answer was "we will switch to the bandwidth algorithm".
Later on, we decided that it was not the best idea, but the question should have been reevaluated at that time.
Of course, with the wisdom of hindsight, it's always super easy to make a perfect plan to avoid all the problems...
... that occurred in the past. Unfortunately, the RC plugin was very difficult to test in the artificial testnet environment.

TL;DR version:

I need to improve this uncertainty to a level that is acceptable

Oh, and how we can do that?
Hardfork approval standards
Is that the ultimate solution that will make sure that we won’t hit severe issues like we did last time?
No, it is not. But it can lower the risk significantly. @timcliff wrote a very good post about

4. What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?

I've released promotional videos (including: Flourishing Steem, Steem Power Inside, Steem Pressure, SteemSTEM promo, more on the way)
I’m promoting and lobbying for the Steem platform, and STEEM (including exchanges, service providers, and high quality content creators), during various meetups and talks at every latitude, longitude, and altitude I visit.

5. Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?

I'm delegating SP to Utopian (almost 50% of my all SP) to help incentivize development work and to members of the SteemSTEM community, supporting i-Talent competition ("Competition Both Performed And Judged By The Artists"), and actively (manually) curating local non-English communities, mostly #Polish and #Japanese (shout-out to all the people involved in manual content discovery and curation).

6. Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?

Yes, of course.

7. Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.

I keep the Steem.chat up and running.
I write the Steem Pressure series, I really hope to get back to it soon (I wasn't very active lately, because there was a lot of work regarding HF20).
I also consult and help with a lot of various development initiatives related to Steem.

8. Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read what’s happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?

Not all communications should be public, some are not meant to be public.
Requesting public access to private channels makes no sense.

Obviously, public communication channels are as important as private ones, and I would very much like the #witness channel on steem.chat to be such a public place for conversations. It is available to the public in the broad sense.

Maintaining good communication is always problematic, and that problem is not limited to Steemit Inc. As you can see, I also have a problem communicating my efforts as a witness in a timely manner.
In one of my previous posts, I introduced myself as a witness witnessing witnesses ;-) As someone who wants to connect all these complex issues and make them more easily understandable to the general public. Unfortunately, I underestimated the amount of effort required to do that effectively.

During the recent problems with the platform I did everything to get my infrastructure (and therefore the platform) up and running again, and I didn’t have time to communicate everything I did via the chat. That would have slowed me down to a considerable degree without bringing any benefits. (Time shared witnesses wouldn’t have helped much at that point anyway).

Still, I understand those who were frustrated with the fact that there was not enough communication.
We usually think “someone will do that”.
There is no “someone” here, it’s ultimately the job of each and every one of us.

In other words, there is always room for improvement when it comes to communication.

9. STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?

Steemit Inc. has its product roadmap and enough resources to run this development. I’m fine with that. Witnesses are not blockchain developers, although they could obviously do that too. I will gladly support other development efforts, whether run by witnesses or by companies interested in the platform or by organizations or communities, as long as they make sense.

10. Why do you deserve to become the top witness?

I’m doing my best to help the Steem platform.
Whether this is enough to deserve votes depends only on those who vote for me.

Thanks for asking all these questions and for being interested in these issues. I decided to include those QA in my recent witness update post

  1. Why did you decide to become a witness?

When I got here I knew I would be doing the work anyway, so might as well be a witness at the same time.

  1. Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?

Not yet, but I have filed a lot of issues and found a lot of bugs.

  1. HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that?
    Idea from @steemitqa.

The current theme right now is to have standards for hard forks. I spoke with a few witnesses before HF20 and I mentioned I was considering removing my vote for HF20 as I think we needed another week of testing. This involves changing my witness back to a hf19 producer as each block you sign casts your vote for hf19 or hf20. The general response was "I will wait for top 20 to see what they do." In the end, I didn't do I already lost a couple witness votes because I didn't start signing for HF20 immediately upon release (even though I was having problems replaying with it and I wasn't comfortable running it yet) and backing down to hf19 is basically witness suicide.

  1. What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?

I have onboarded a lot of people to Steem, I am also working on a new project called @steemboosters where we will create marketing ideas to promote Steem to outsides.

I am a firm believer we need a SteemFest that is not catering to Steem users who are already on board, but to businesses, projects, and users to bring them to Steem. I believe this is critical to our success. We need to focus more on getting Apps on Steem that bring in users to spend and power up Steem rather than shit post, power down, and sell (rinse repeat).

  1. Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?

I am very active in the @helpie community, I have delegated almost 20K SP and helping reward the best of the best. I also provide the hardware for a primary and secondary witness for them.

I also am an admin of OpGaming community, active in PAL, I delegate to projects like C-Squared, MinnowSupportProject, and SteemFlagRewards.

My own Discord has almost 3,000 members.

  1. Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?

Usually yes, it's been a while since I played with C++ but I have enough understanding to read the code base. It is a very large overwhelming project without devoting full time to understanding. Even reviewing changes requires a lot of review of other sections of code to fully understand.

  1. Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.

Yes, and I have a few projects I am working on right now. My most recent ones are the Global Blacklist API, !pancakes, and !popcorn.

  1. Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read whats happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?

I believe there needs to be a private channel as having every witness (600+) in there during emergencies will be utter chaos. Even during regular times, it would be chaotic and counterproductive. I am in favorite of better communications from Steemit Inc and these private channels to other witnesses and the community.

  1. STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?

Against popular believe, witnesses do not get paid a lot. Especially at these prices. Top 20 witnesses get paid well, but not for what they are expected to do. Outside of the top 20, is a dramatic 500% difference in pay.

A top 20 witness makes 8,000 SP/month. About 30-50% of that goes to taxes. They are then expected to run a full node ($800-$1,500/month) and review all code changes while making their own changes. At current prices a top 20 makes around 76K/year, you couldn't even hire a junior blockchain developer for that price. Now add in the fact top 20 are expected to delegate most of their stake to "support communities" and the fact 8,000 SP/month isn't even spendable to cover the fiat costs until you start powering down. Although it looks like a lot of money, it isn't a much as people think and the job the 'community' wants them to do is far larger than people expect. I haven't even covered the users who feel that witnesses they vote for should be supporting them with regular upvotes.

  1. Why do you deserver to become the top witness?

I am active, present, and passionate about Steem. I put in a lot of time trying to prevent abuse and fraud on the platform. I have managed 4 full nodes for over 6 months and frequently help many other witnesses with their equipment and configuration. I am a technical witness and have a lot of understanding and like to help others.

Definitely agree on pay, especially at current prices.Thanks for supporting the blockchain with tools like your global blacklist api, something that I'm 100% going to use on one of my projects. It appears that a lot of top witnesses do want to keep it private and I'm understanding why more and more as I read the different ideas proposed. Thanks for your response.


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1. Why did you decide to become a witness?

After discovering Steem, as a developer/engineer previously focused on content systems, finding ways to be as involved and help evolve the system was my reason for joining.

2. Have you made any contributions that have been accepted into the STEEM codebase? If so, what was it?

Nothing notable directly into the STEEM codebase, as I'm not a C++ developer. I can read it rather well and understand what it does, but just have focused on other languages.

3. HF20 started out with a ton of bugs. What do you plan on doing in order to make sure that we don't suffer a repeat of that?

Continue pressuring Steemit Inc (or other developers in the future) to not release massive updates, and instead release faster/smaller updates which are easier to review. The last update itself had hundreds of thousands of lines of code changed, which made it nearly impossible to review in it's entirety.

That's also not to mention that many of the changes were theoretical in nature and could only be seen with live conditions, which requires better testing via testnets, with real usage on them.

4. What have you done to promote the STEEM blockchain outside of the blockchain itself?

As an introverted software developer - not a lot actually outside of the blockchain, besides engaging with people with questions on site like Reddit. I have a pretty deep understandings of the mechanics behind STEEM, and am often able to respond to questions on /r/CryptoCurrency and other non-STEEM specific discussion platforms.

5. Communities have become a very big thing in the STEEM ecosystem recently. Have you done anything to promote communities and help them out?

I've contributed code to a number of different communities and their projects, delegated SP to a few of them (like utopian), and try to support initiatives that attempt to bring STEEM itself outside of Steemit.com (like steempress/wise-team).

6. Do you understand enough of the STEEM codebase and C++ to be able to tell what changes are being made when they are committed?

Yes. This familiarity comes from studying and reverse engineering the algorithms for a number of systems to recreate them for a number of STEEM related apps/sites I've built.

7. Have you developed anything for STEEM? It doesn't need to be software, a community that utilizes STEEM counts too.

Over the years I've had a number of projects, some still running and others retired/unmaintained. Most notably I'm the developer behind Vessel (Desktop Wallet for Steem) and SteemDB.com (Block Explorer), and previously I worked on chainBB (Forum Interface for Steem), SteemStats (Dashboard), chainsync/model (DevTools), and Reprint (Wordpress Engine for Steem).

8. Communication was a major problem for STEEMIT INC. Many people want the public to be able to read whats happening in the private witness channel that STEEMIT INC has created. What do you think about that?

I honestly wouldn't mind, so long as there's a separate channel in which security matters can be discussed. There are moments where it's critical that the producers resolve/deploy minor fixes to prevent abuse, and if that channel was public, we'd just be opening up the blockchain to further attacks.

But in terms of day-to-day chatter about witness matters, I think it may be good if those were public. Probably boring though :)

9. STEEMIT INC has done a major part of the development for the STEEM blockchain. Who should be doing more of the development for the blockchain, them or the witnesses? Or is it a shared responsibility where the witnesses do one part and STEEMIT INC does the rest?

Development IMO isn't specifically a shared responsibility - in that it's not a witnesses role to specifically develop the blockchain itself. As I recall, a few years ago Steemit Inc changed their stance to:

Witnesses are paid to produce blocks and review code, nothing more.

That doesn't mean that witnesses shouldn't attempt to add value though, even through developing for the STEEM blockchain. They should fulfill their primary roles (above) and add value wherever possible to help contribute to the success of the project.

It's a rough situation though - since really Steemit Inc are the only ones financially capable (through STEEM itself) of funding the type of development that the STEEM blockchain needs. With their massive stockpile of Steem from the early days, they still own probably more than 40% of the total supply and are using that to fund multiple development teams to build the various projects, all behind closed door without any oversight. Witness pay within the top 21 is still really only enough to cover hardware costs and then earn a modest part time salary, and for most people (myself included), this ends up being a massive paycut should we work full time on Steem.

I don't know how it would work - but an idea I've tried pushing for a long time is that witnesses (or some other payment scheme) should generate enough revenue to build out an entire team of developers. If that were to happen, and say 3-5 "companies" were elected into these positions and earned enough funding for teams, we'd see a lot more competent developers actually contributing to the blockchain code itself.

10. Why do you deserver to become the top witness?

When you consider everything - I don't, not more than any of the other witnesses competing for the positions, all with great efforts and projects in the works.

When you boil it down to the basic responsibilities of a witness though (operations, block production, and code review), I think that the experience I have (HF20 was my 7th hardfork and 2 years of experiencing running STEEM) is where most of the value I bring comes into play. Experience matters and helps you work through problems faster than if you were new.

Thanks for the insight. Didn't know that STEEMIT INC. had an official stance on what witnesses should do.

Continue pressuring Steemit Inc (or other developers in the future) to not release massive updates, and instead release faster/smaller updates which are easier to review.

100% agree with that, especially after reading @reggaemuffin's post. Thanks for developing Vessel, its part of my day to day STEEM usage apps. Makes having multiple wallets easy. Don't need to keep switching. Having witnesses who can develop tools for STEEM greatly benefits us all and I thank for for doing all that.

I hope this reaches the witnesses. Some good old fashioned answers to end-users would be enlightening.

@timcliff and @gtg have aggreed to answer. Hope I get more. If you could soread the word i would love it.

For the cause. Resteemed.
I also nagged a few witnesses on Discord. Hopefully they'll show up.

Thank you so much, its much appreciated. The data collected not just helps me, but it helps everyone make more informed witness votes.

I'm glad it kicked off well.

Definitely has, this is way more witnesses that've answered than I thought. I read them all on my phone, but then reread them on my computer and then respond to them. Slow process to get through all of them, but it works.

Yeah, it's a lot to digest, I'm doing the same thing.

Thanks to all the witnesses who've answered so far. I've read them all but haven't had much time to analyze them much or respond. Hopefully I will have some time for that tomorrow.

Here's the link to an answer made by another witness: https://busy.org/@kevinwong/witness-update-11-10-2018.