Interview with @reggaemuffin, minnowbooster extraordinaire: Witness awareness series

Have you ever wondered how Steemit works? The blog you are reading is stored on the steemit blockchain and that block passed through a witness node for verification. If the block was missed, an error appears and you have to re-submit any action (upvote, edit, follow, etc.). Once a witness misses a block, the block goes to the next witness in the queue who likely verifies correctly and gets rewarded 1 SP.
As you may or may not know, being a witness is an incredibly time consuming process and involves keeping a server running 100% of the time. Once a server is running, the campaign for votes begins. Campaigning for votes includes community involvement, projects and a lot of promotion. Passion and committment, as well as community engagement leads to more votes, and the top 19 witnesses are awarded with a block every round.
I have had the opportunity to interview multiple witnesses with various ninja skills and high-level wizardry to see what makes them tick, and why they are so passionate about steemit. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read more about witnesses HERE
The steemit witnesses are constantly evolving and changing positions based on their weighted votes assigned by the steemit community. New witnesses are continually starting up new nodes for the opportunity to help maintain the blockchain and be rewarded for their efforts.

One of these newer witnesses is @reggaemuffin, and he has been busy developing various applications and bots for the steemit community and is currently sitting in the #76 position on the witness list.

Hi there @reggaemuffin, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. Why don’t you start by telling the steemit community a little bit about yourself?

I am a Computer Science Student from Germany and a Developer. I’m fascinated by the possibilities crypto currencies give and look forward to what the future holds for steem.

You joined steemit in May, what made you decide to take on the job of verifying blocks on a cryptocurrency social media site (steemit)?

I was already helping people and doing most of the tasks expected of a witness. I wanted to make sure I do all I can to ensure that steem keeps working and becoming a witness was the logical step there. I can review updates and keep people informed about new changes in a non-technical way and I can provide a stable server and know what to do when stuff breaks.

In a very short time, you have already risen to the number 75 spot. How did you manage to move up so quickly?

I think I was mostly there for new users. Helping with questions, explaining things, giving them a place to meet and promoting them myself as good as I can. In the end, getting new users started and ensuring their success is also ensuring my success.

You have been a very busy witness and have introduced many projects. What are all of your current projects and how much time have you devoted to them (including witness node)?

My witness node is pretty set up. I get notified on any anomalies and check on it regularly but it was smooth sailing till now. The 0.19.1 update took more time reviewing the code than updating the node.

I am currently pretty involved in @buildteam and there mostly @minnowbooster, which is a predictable upvote bot for minnows and also a delegation leasing market where you can be a whale for a week. I also use my bot to fund multiple contests with big delegations that I could not offer myself.

I also run @welcomebot, a small bot that welcomes new users and gives them helpful links. That bot was my first go at the steem API and at that time a novelty (if you don’t count @wang). I noticed many bots emerging now that are not helpful, so I want @welcomebot to stand out. I am always looking for new resources that help new users.

Your contributions to the community are immense. How are you involved with Whaleshares and MinnowSupport Project?

Whaleshares and @officialfuzzy in that regard were the first community I joined and helped me immensely. I helped fuzzy develop the whaleshares website and in turn, he helped me get a standing in the community. He was the first to believe in me and I will never forget that. All my weekly giveaways are distributing some whaleshares to bring new quality users into that community and give them the same kickstart that I got.

I noticed the Minnow Support Project when they were starting and I really liked the idea. I am not a fan of too busy discords so when I participated, I mostly did it on the blockchain. They also got a permanent spot in @welcomebot so @aggroed does not have to make his own bot and add to the spam.

In the wake of all the upvoting for pay bots, let’s take a moment to talk about yours, Minnowbooster. What is it and how does it work? (disclaimer: I use minnowbooster to collect interest on delegated SP).

Minnowbooster has multiple features that all complement each other. You can get your post boosted, you can lease Steem Power, or you can invest into the bot and earn dividends.

Upvoting works by sending SBD to the bot and your posts URL as the memo. We have daily and weekly limits in place to ensure it benefits all minnows and not a few people with a big pocket. And we display if you promoted yourself or if someone gifted you a promotion. We hope this motivates users to gift a booster to a friend and established users to boost minnows. That is also the reason why limits are per receiver, so you can gift many boosters but no person can benefit too much from it.

Leasing Steem Power works by sending steem to the bot. You can specify how long you want to rent and you can gift it to someone else. The current rate most likely won’t earn you back your investment in curation rewards but the increased upvote can help you establish a standing in the community. I use the delegation feature to support multiple giveaways by offering a delegation price to the winner.

Investing in the bot is possible in three ways: You can delegate to the bot and receive a share of upvote earnings or you power up the bot and also earn from the delegation. Or you fill orders on the marketplace and earn steem that way. Our investment offers are motivating whales to power up their account and keeps steem in the system. The result is a rising steem price that benefits us all.

Recently a lot of steemians have been getting bandwidth errors and are looking to the community for help. Why has this been happening and what are devs/witnesses doing to remedy it?

I wrote a piece on that issue a few days ago: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@reggaemuffin/bandwidth-limit-exceeded-how-witnesses-help-you

There is a steem network parameter that is intended to mitigate spam on the network. But the code was faulty and the parameter locked out all people with low steem power because it thought steem was under a spam attack. While the devs were investigating the bug (and found more bugs) we witnesses increased the block size temporarily to trick the network into thinking the spam attack was over. That helped some minnows and a day later the 0.19.1 update fixed the bug and witnesses updated quickly.

We noticed that many minnows use their bandwidth without knowing it exists. If you vote for hundreds of posts each day with a small percentage or follow thousands of people each day, that costs you bandwidth and if you hit your limit you are locked out of your account and need to buy steem power to get back in. So in retrospect, we noticed many of the minnows who got hit by the parameter were using up their bandwidth a lot, so when the parameter made bandwidth limits tighter, they got locked out first.

In my post, I mentioned some witnesses who helped locked out minnows and reacted quickly. I suggest everyone to vote for them because they can help you should such a situation arise again and voting for them brings them in a position to react quicker.

What changes would you like to see made to the User Interface and current steemit blockchain?

Steemit is trying to abstract away all the internals of the network. It is doing an overall good job at it. But many features like delegation are completely missing from it. The wallet merges all delegations so users have no overview how much SP they can still delegate.

Also, bandwidth is not displayed in the UI. Steemd got a bar but steemit did not get it. When people have important stats visible all the time, a problem like this one won’t happen to so many users.

One thing that is a pain point is the mention feature. It is really hard to keep track of mentions, because steemit does not show them to you and all tools who try are working only sporadically. Mentions are as important as replies and while I know that from a technical point of view they are very different, for the end users they are pretty similar and both deserve a tab

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

Witnesses decide how steem evolves. They decide important network parameters, ensure that the SBD has a constant price and have the last say if an update to the blockchain is done or not. So should a developer put out an update that could be bad for steem, witnesses have the power to say no to the update. And the last time that happened things were fixes quickly.

So think of witnesses like the government of steem. They are not all powerful but they steer the network in a direction and if you vote on those you agree with you can influence where this journey will go.

My goal as a witness is improving the network for all users. My strategy is small incremental changes. Help one user and he can help the next. Explain one problem and people can prevent it. Make a small tool to solve a problem for all users. I am doing many things on steem and if you think I am making this network a better place, please vote for me as a witness. And if you have an idea, a plan, a suggestion or a question, I will be there to help you as much as I can.

OK, so now that you know what these wonderful witnesses do for our community, the least you can do it vote for them. Dead witnesses verify no blocks, so cast your votes and make sure our blocks get verified and not dropped.

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

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

Don't forget to check out @reggaemuffin witness thread. Also feel free to check out @minnowbooster to see the various services they offer

Previous Interview threads

@ausbitbank
@aggroed
@theprophet0
@neoxian
@someguy123
@timcliff
@dragosroua
@followbtcnews

Upcoming Interview threads

@good-karma

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

Thanks to the PALNet and MinnowSupport project

The PALnet and MinnowSupport project is one of the fastest growing Steemit social groups supported by @aggroed @ausbitbank @theprophet0 @neoxian @someguy123 @thecryptodrive @teamsteem, & @followbtcnews. We have almost 4000 members dedicated to helping each other grow into dolphins and eventually whales, and are fueled by member delegations. @crimsonclad has been working her tail off creating a new website for the MSP and PALnet members.

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

Check out @crimsonclad's beautiful new MSP site at http://minnowsupportproject.org/ and please join our Discord server at https://discord.gg/HYj4yvw

Minnow Support Project: Problem Statement, Vision Statement, Mission Statement, and Plan to help you grom from Minnow to Whale with friends in record time

Image courtesy of @justcallmemyth

thanks to @kristyglas for the line breaks, find more here

If you are a witness and would like to be interviewed, you can find me in the PALnet discord chat or steemit.chat

Check out some of my previous posts if you like what you've read

Witness Awareness Series: Interviews with various witnesses
Interview with @followbtcnews
Interview with @dragorsoua
Interview with @timcliff
Interview with @someguy123
Interview with @neoxian
Interviews with @aggroed, @theprophet0, and @ausbitbank

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