SteemFest² in Portugal this November will be awesome! Thank you for another amazing week together as a witness on Steem! What have I contributed during the last week and what am I planning for the next week? Will you read this activity log to find out because this is my report card to you each week in exchange for what you have helped generously give to me in author rewards and Steem Power as a witness?

Review of Full Time Service as a Steem Witness!

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September 21, 2017 to September 27, 2017.

1. Booked my hotel room at HF Fénix Lisboa for SteemFest² after the amazing amount of kind feedback and guidance shared in the post I made asking if I should go! I am arriving early in the morning on November 1, 2017 and leaving on November 6! I will be buying my plane ticket and SteemFest² ticket in the next week or so!
2. Presented the current results for all Steem advertising campaigns on Facebook in a post named 3,245,273 Facebook Users See Ads for Steem on $4,622.37 Ad Spend which raised funding for my fifth video ad for Steem on Facebook and YouTube! All the campaigns including contributions and ad spend are available for any of us to review at any time at https://airtable.com/shrXuoYTnODWA0QG1. Thank you to @cryptokeepr, @pretzelgirlsandy, and @adamhays for making individual contributions via wallet transfers!
3. Made a request to build the Steem freelancer marketplace SteemJ into Busy.org, ChainBB, or eSteem because it seems logical to help the apps we already use and love to grow instead of making another app which would essentially compete with existing apps. My plan at this point is to collaborate with one or more of the existing Steem apps to ask the developer to build in SteemJ's proposed functionality into the existing app in exchange for participation in a growth project following the crowdfunded marketing protocol which would then offer a reward for completing the feature upgrade!
4. Continued the series of posts and matching videos aimed at helping increase witness voting participation by sharing more about who the active witnesses are and what contributions each makes in Meet Steem's Top 30 Witnesses. This series of posts which started with the top 10, moved into the top 20, and reached into the top 30 yesterday is a collaboration with @lexiconical who does the research which I then edit into a post and produce a video for.
5. Published 3 new upvotable posts in our ongoing curation project helping to connect readers with authors on Steem. After testing many formats, I now am featuring individual authors I love directly in the titles instead of a series of posts because existing curation projects such as @curie and @ocd already do a great job collecting the very best new posts. Our unique opportunity with upvotable seems to be to highlight authors that are authentic, persistent, and generous in contributions to Steem while not frequently reaching the trending page or receiving large amounts of upvotes.
6. Found $63,278 of Private Keys on Steemit.com in 10 Minutes and reached out to each of those users to help them change their keys along with a request made in the post to exchanges to stop allowing private keys in memo posts. While I originally made the request for memos on Steemit also, @gtg was kind enough to let me know this feature was already in place!
7. Produced 4 new videos on YouTube and my Facebook page mentioning or featuring Steem to over 2 million followers.
8. Posted a tutorial on Steemit showing how to use a credit card on Bitstamp.net to buy Bitcoin and then use @blocktrades to change that Bitcoin into Steem. For users hoping to fund a Steem wallet, I hope this makes it much easier!
9. Explained how to get a retweet by the @steemit account on Twitter in yet another post to inspire authors to write at the very top of our ability.
10. Showed how to avoid fees on Coinbase when buying Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Ethereum using the gdax.com exchange.
11. Shared two new updates for my happier people blog featuring a look at what I do each day and the real reason I started eating vegan!
12. Tested another food and travel post in Lunch and Dinner at Mojo Burrito in Chattanooga, Tennessee
13. Went wild and bought 22,754.995 more Steem on Bittrex as the Steem price slid down under $1 and powered it all up!
14. Read and responded to hundreds of comments on my posts with as many thoughtful replies as possible!
15. Received a letter in the mail asking for help with getting an account created for Steem saying that it had been 10 days and no follow up or email from Steem since the user tried to sign up. I then planned a new system to help users get new accounts quickly without charging any fee. This week I am planning to test this system and once it works for me, offer the service to anyone wanting to sign up and fund a new account with at least $100 of Steem. My basic idea at this point is to accept the deposits on the new account, transfer 80% of the Steem to the account and power it up, and then power up the remaining 20% in the account I use to create new accounts which will then delegate that 20% to the new account to ensure the user can always transact on the blockchain even if powering down completely because the delegation will remain indefinitely. I value feedback on this idea!

Witness Servers!

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I have a witness, seed, and backup server all with the following specifications!

64GB DDR4 RAM
2x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V3
2x 240GB SSDs
1Gbit/s connection

The witness and seed have been online since I launched 3 months ago. I am still setting the backup server up and am planning a free video tutorial and Steem post showing how I do it! While I collaborate with @someguy123 to help me manage the servers, I setup both servers and published a guide showing how I did it with no previous Ubuntu Linux experience thanks to a lot of help in the steemit.chat witness channel especially from @someguy123 and @drakos. I am continuing to get more comfortable inside the servers because I feel it is important for me as a witness to be able to manage my own servers without help while continuing to learn from the more experienced witnesses and Linux server administrators.

Projects In Progress!

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1. Advertising and marketing campaigns for Steem as seen at https://airtable.com/shrXuoYTnODWA0QG1. This is currently my #1 focus and I am planning to scale up in October along with consistently publishing all my results and adding all author rewards received to the ad budget. Today I will be going back and including all the previous posts in the ad budget I made as reports in the budget also. For simplicity, I will be entering the bills for Facebook and YouTube by campaign instead of against individual posts. I am planning a post soon to start using the majority of the ads to promote other authors, apps, and features in Steemit instead of just my profile :)
2. Local Meetups! I am still searching for a venue for a weekly local Steem meetup near Tampa, Florida that I hope will help attract many new users in the area and empower existing users to make the greatest contributions!
3. Backup and Witness Setup Video Tutorial! This past week, I spent some time inside my witness server and seed learning how to install fail2ban, learning how to check the version of steemd running, and updating my witness URL with my newest update this week. While it is nice to see an original witness launch URL, I think it is ideal when considering which witness to vote for to see a recent update on the URL which is why I am planning to update my URL each week. I need to install conductor in my witness and then I will be ready to do the backup setup from start to finish! The work with the ad campaigns for Steem this week has consumed a lot of my time and I hope to get the backup server online in October!
4. Data! There are so many amazing reports I would love to present showing usage of Steem and I am excited to learn how to pull the data directly from the blockchain to make my own reports along with producing tutorials showing everything I needed to learn along the way! This project is in the planning phases and will be done after the backup is online!
5. SteemJ Collaboration! I made a post this week asking to build SteemJ into another app and will be available to discuss more about how to turn that into a growth project for eSteem, ChainBB, and/or busy.org when I receive a reply from any of the developers of these apps!

Witness Votes!

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Who am I voting for as a witness today as seen at https://steemdb.com/@jerrybanfield/witness

Every day or two I update my witness votes to ensure witnesses I see contributing the most to maintain and grow Steem receive my support. This week I just realized @fyrstikken = @Fyrst-witness and I added a vote for @Fyrst-witness by removing a witness that appeared to go inactive along with placing a comment on a post to let the witness know why I removed the vote.

Who is voting for my witness? https://steemdb.com/@jerrybanfield/witness

Thank you very much to @teamsteem, @hendrikdegrote, and @roadscape for being one of the first to vote for me as a witness! I am blown away this month by votes from @pumpkin who is proxied by @freedom (the largest single Steem Power holder outside of the official @steemit account) along with @clayop the leader of the Korean community on Steem and top 10 witness @klye! I appreciate the votes from @tamim, @fulltimegeek, @xaero1, @nanzo-scoop, @snowflake, @freeyourmind, @someonewhoisme, @cryptoctopus, and @sean-king which are helping me to receive over 40 blocks every day now at rank 29! Each of your votes is huge in motivating me to show up here every day and dedicate the majority of my time to work at building our community here on Steem!

For getting witness votes, updates like this and posts adding significant value to Steem appear to be the most effective method of helping witness voters with a lot of Steem Power discover us and make upvotes for our witnesses which is why I have committed to producing one of these each week!

Thank You for Reading!

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I appreciate the chance to be of service to our community here full time and will begin writing my next post immediately after publishing this one!

Love,
Jerry Banfield

Shared on

• Facebook page with 2,249,979 likes.
• Twitter to 105,304 followers.

PS: This post today is a part of my service as a full time witness for Steem! Witness votes are the most important 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 1173 accounts voting for me as a witness, the 258M VESTS assigned from users trusting me to make all witness votes by setting me as proxy, and @followbtcnews for making these .gif images!

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