I have done it now. I am now the proud owner of 3 months of a subscription to a hosting service at https://www.host1plus.com/ where I found some referral coupon code to get a 50% discount, so I ginnied up a virtual machine with 6 CPU cores, 16Gb of memory, 500Gb of storage and 19Tb of traffic allocation.

I selected the Ubuntu 16.04 pre-made image - which happens to be the same version of Ubuntu that I run on my little vaio, and I've now set up SSH certificate login and I am going to shortly start following the various guides for getting a Steem Witness up and running.

Once I have it up and running and it gets itself listed in the Witness directory and all that jazz, I'm gonna be on a mission to convince you, dear reader, plus as many other people as possible, to vote for my witness.

What will l0k1 do for you if you vote for him when his Witness is online?

More or less, basically I will be using the funding to develop my blockchain matrix/blockchain toolkit project, which I of course intend to use to eventually demonstrate functionalities I conceived that are not in Steem and as I have mentioned before, the process of breaking apart the Steem blockchain into a Fabric (or as I call it, Matrix), I think it's going to take longer than people expect. Or should I say 'hope'. Migration processes are never as quick or easy as anyone expects.

(And maybe we will see someone do the first blockchain language port, or the first multi-language blockchain source code!).

In general I want to work mainly on materials, and code, for teaching people about blockchains and how they are implemented. In my opinion Steem is the straight up best designed blockchain on the internet, and I want to be witness so I can help it become also a hub of blockchain developers, in general.

I want to continue to write about things that I have been writing about up to this point, but now I will be able to write about my Witness business, and also, with the relatively idle Witness not using much resources running on the server, I can do a few odd things in the idle-background time, like testing my code. I might dream up some other useful, low-resource things I can run off my server as well that are useful to people.

So, back to the terminal, and let's make this thing happen!

For those interested to know, to get some idea of the capability of my $90/month (ex DDC) service gives me in terms of performance, building the source with 6 cores using 6 threads using the time command I came out with this result at the end of the build:

real    7m38.649s
user    25m28.748s
sys 2m9.764s

Well, I'm not sure exactly what that 'user' number means, I suppose that's the sum of all 6 threads together. 7 minutes and 38 seconds. I remember building the witness once back in version 0.14 or so, and on my AMD a10 apu quad system it took more than an hour. So the hosting server seems to be pretty danged nippy.

Oh, I think those figures might be incorrect. I have NL localisation on my system, because that's where I am located, and the variables passed through SSH and the dutch utf8 locale was missing. I uncommented it from /etc/locale.gen and ran locale-gen, and restarted the build and it took a different time.

Actually, it was just a little bit slower, but not much. This is something that non-american users are more likely to bump into. Windows users probably won't see this error at all, SSH uses the environment variables the same as the client, in this case, and it passes them to the remote session. In other words, your locale variables are loaded into your remote shell session.

(probably) Final update

I have my witness up and running now and it's syncing the blockchain. I think maybe by the end of tomorrow I should have a firm grasp on this and be able to start playing with it, like installing piston-steem on it and testing out the RPC endpoint.

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We can't stop here! This is Whale country!