Featuring Fyrstikken: Get to Know Your Witness!

^{Fighting the Peruvian Heat with Hanna}

Why do you want to be a Steemit witness? What would you put the money earned from being a witness go towards?
Currently I'm in the top 100 witnesses and hope to be in the top 50, ideally being among the top 19. This will enable my server to mine enough Steem per day to be able to pay for advertisements, conference rooms, and maybe an auditorium where I can host investor seminars. This is a way I can "Preach the word of Steemit" by presenting Steem as an investment and Steemit as the platform people use to Latin America and the Spanish speaking community.

While I'd love to be able pay for all of this out of my own pocket, I'm not in a position where that is quite possible. I'm definitely no @berniesanders.

What do you enjoy the most about being a Steemit Witness?
I love the blog platform of Steemit. I didn't think I could fall "head over heels" again for another cryptocurrency or a crypto project, yet here I am! My head is completely full of all thoughts Steem and Steemit.
Steemit stands apart from other crypto projects in so many ways that I've never seen before. For starters the transactions as a currency are just so quick, that when moving funds from account to account it seems to complete almost instantaneously.

I love having @ned and @dantheman at the top of the helm, who I view as being as smart when it comes to the extremely complicated crypto technology (Graphene.) They are fantastic visionaries doing for Steemit what Steve Jobs was to Apple. Now that Mr. Jobs is no longer with Apple, we don't see anything exciting, fun or new coming out from that company compared to before. As long as we have @ned and @dantheman with Steemit, I feel that we can go all the way...it's just so fun!

What are some of the biggest changes in Steemit in your eyes? Why?
I think the biggest change was the price of Steem itself, which naturally occurs. It went up 2000% really quickly (nearing the $4 mark) and has been moving down rather slowly from that high point. With many different people investing all the up and down, there are many "bag-holders" in Steemit. I have seen a noticeable mood swing among some Steemit members who thought it should be trading at around $1, but now were at $0.35. This made some people feel that they got little Steem for their investment since they bought at higher prices. Unfortunately with investments, sometimes that's just how it is.

It's good however to remember that everyone is an investor, even those content creators who haven't put in their own money. Many users have invested their time, artistic creativity, etc....people's time is worth money. Everything people do, like this interview itself, is worth money.

When I joined Steemit, is was pretty basic with posts, upvotes, downvotes, flags. Now we don't have the downvote button anymore with only upvote and flag options. We have a LOT more users now than before and are attracting better bloggers from around the world who are giving Steemit a chance.

The platform is always changing, evolving and refining itself to make things better. Once exciting piece in the near future include is the profile section with your name (real or not, based on preference), nickname, picture, links to website and other blogs.

How do you approach potential investors to persuade them to invest into Steem and the Steemit platform?
It's a hard sale. Typically investors come to a seminar not knowing what to expect. To begin with, I need to prepare the time and place of the venue we book, make sure market and advertise when and where the presentation will be held, prepare the presentation itself, ensure the PA system works, arrange for refreshments for attendees.

Beyond this I would still need partners who would be able to take fiat money and send liquid (available to be traded) Steem so that these new accounts could be powered up. I have many friends who have larger sums of money available for such investments, so I've been asking a few whales that if I had a investor who would like to come in with between $400,000 to $1 Million USD, would they be able to accommodate this. Unfortunately they were not at the moment, due to the price being low right now.

However this does let me talk about Steem as a great investment because I invest myself now, powering up some of what I've bought on the market. While I could power-up more, it's important to have some liquid Steem for OTC (over-the-counter) sales.

Has having most Steem locked in Steem Power been an impediment to attracting new investors?
Not really. Because I can show graphs of new user sign-ups, site activity, price graph showing how high we've been and how low we are now...which is a great way to talk in investor language. I can compare what Facebook and Steemit are worth and can say that there is probably a lot more room to grow here than in Facebook.
I see Steemit as a package is fantastic on it's own, but we also have Golos and a couple other things where I wouldn't mind selling a hedge with Steem Power or Steem Dollars. I think the OTC price should be about 20% over or under the going rate so long as it's tied up with Bitcoin because of all the time it takes to move fiat (think of your normal paper, government backed money) into crypto-currency. This would be a 10% margin on Steem and another 10% margin on Bitcoin, since you have a couple transactions, first Bitcoin to then get money into Steem.

What advice would you give a new user that's never been in cryptocurrency?
First come to Steemspeak.com and be a part of this community. It doesn't cost anything and is completely public, you can maintain anonymity as wanted. Those in this community have so much common sense that if you go in there and say, "Someone said I should invest in one coin, there will be many people who will protest immediately saying that's not even a coin yet, having concerns of it being a scam." You might not have that security if new and don't have a community of people who know what's going on in the crypto world, which Steemspeak readily provides access to for anybody to those "in the know."

This has been running under the name of Stakepool since 2014 and many people in crypto know us for being the "zero bullshit" community for all things crypto or financial technology. That's why this is the first place I'd recommend to any new user to be a part of, just so you have people you can talk to about all the others things that you're going to discover in crypto land, which might be good things or the worst ever. Everyone needs somebody to talk to or ask questions about things regarding the realm of crypto.

On the content creator side, when you're new and coming in to compete with all the other creators, you need to be seen. If you don't know anybody on Steemit, it can be a little tough to find somebody that you know. In this sense, coming to Steemspeak.com is still very useful because everyone there is on Steemit as well as going to steemit.chat. When you make a post, promote it in the steemit.chat promotion channels as well as paste the link into Steemspeak. There is always someone who is there to read it and if we think it's really good we will read it out loud to be heard on the radio as well as have an mp3 made out of it.

I was the one who created and pay for Steemspeak and mp3's are stored at archive.steemspeak.com (that isn't on the blockchain) where anyone is welcome to use these to create their own posts with. Some have made over $100 using these archived mp3's making it so people are incentivized to come to the Steemspeak channel and use these on their own. Anybody is more than welcome to just drop in and start interviewing people, no invitations are necessary. This is a tool for the whole community to enjoy and benefit from. Rather than keeping these archives to myself, I'd rather share the earning opportunities with everybody.

I'm a fan of human generosity, being transparent and just be flat honest with people. They deserve that.
What I've noticed since I started Steemspeak (by branding Stakepool for Steemit) we've got a great mix of Steemians and those with a long history in crypto-currency in here. This is just a perfect environment for tech talk, but is also a great way to socialize the crypto traders with the non-crypto crowd. After being a long time crypto trader, just having normal conversations with normal people about normal things can be a little bit challenging. We have our own vocabulary and way of talking with each other. Bringing these two groups together really seems to provide community building and other mutual benefits.

What's you're thought on voting bots?
For a long time I voted manually and naturally I started to miss some users posts having hundreds of users that I watch. So for the last week or two I've started using an upvote bot so I wouldn't miss voting on peoples posts that I follow.

@xeroc came up with Piston which was great, but it didn't quite do everything I wanted a bot to be able to do. So @furion then wrote a bot in Python for Piston, and it looked great but it had a few things I wanted it to do, that I needed. Then @contentjunkie looked at @furion's code, rewriting it a bit making it even better than it was. Now I have a great bot that is voting for over 800 people everyday and my vote power is still at 98%!

I am glad I've waited to use the bot though, being great to first learn Steemit manually, which I've found to provide me a much better understanding of this site. Now that the bot is doing the upvote work, I'm getting more time to read and digest more content, which is what I find to be important for me and others.

Do you have pets?

I was babysitting Mona, a french bulldog, for a little while recently. But I do have 3 dogs, all Scottish Terriers, James and Blake (who are brothers) and Hanna (who is the daughter of James.) Obviously because we don't want her to have babies with her uncle, James and Blake stay now stay a few houses down at our niece's home who loves and cares for them now. My wife and I still have and care for Hanna ourselves.

^{Left: James, Blake and Hanna - Right: Hanna}
We don't give Hanna dog food, when we make food for ourselves we give a small portion of it to her. Luckily the dog only needs about 1/6th portion of my meals, she doesn't need that much. But, I'm not comfortable giving Hanna something that my wife and I wouldn't eat ourselves.

What is your favorite color?
I have a favorite imaginary color that doesn't exist. My favorite color is Pink. It doesn't exist in the rainbow, it's not there in the spectrum of white light. Pink is a color the brain makes up by seeing the edges of the ultraviolet and infrared sides of the scale with pink being in the middle. Pink is like black, which in reality is the absence of all color, yet it's extremely popular and sells really well.

I've learned that the technical name for pink is "minus green." It should really be called negative-green. Unfortunately I can't tell little girls that pink doesn't exist because I've found it makes them cry.
Is it a surprise that my favorite band is Pink Floyd, which is played a lot on the Steemspeak radio. Also my favorite pop-artist is of course Pink. I've been stage managing while she's been on tour and have to say she's a tough artist. All respect to her as a mature, smart, hard working artist, especially compared to other pop stars our there. Even if I don't love all of Pink's songs, some being a little too commercial for me, I do love some of them and her attitude as an artist in general. I just find her to be fascinating and can't wait to see her profile put up on Steemit!

What do you do for fun outside of the blockchain?
I like to go to the jungle to relax for a few days without internet or electricity. Some time is spent by the swimming pool, at the beach, eating really good food from the barbecue, periodically spent a day at the yacht club.

I do like to spend time with my wife, going on dates with her, walking hand in hand. We're both growing up one year every year...and with Steemit and the blockchain taking about 17-18 hours a day at the computer, finding life away from the computer is important. I do need to prioritize some more time for this whether quality time with my wife or even setting up and running investor seminars. The big requirement is that it's outside of my "trading bunker" and getting out there having fun and "Preaching Steem."

One other plan is making use of steemit.com.p and steemit.p (the Peruvian domain) for new Peruvian minnow events. Luckily these aren't expensive compared to the investor events.

How did you get your online name?
Fyrstikken means matches, match sticks. It closely describes my fierce personality. With a match you can start a fire for yourself, boil water, cook food...if you run out of them you might be in trouble.

But a match also when first lit, bursts forth into fire before it stabilizes. This somewhat describes me as well, in the I can be passionately explosive (like Steve Jobs was) which is part of my persona. I have so many things that I want to see happen and ideally come to fruition, that I don't care for when I feel that my time is being wasted. While I don't hold directed anger towards the person, I'd rather be freed up so I can put my time towards something more enjoyable or productive.

I prefer to work with people that I feel are carrying their own weight. It's one thing for those that are trying and ramping themselves up, but some just don't seem to be interested in putting in the effort. If they don't want to work, that's fine, but then I'd rather just do it myself to get the job done.

What are your hopes for yourself and Steemit in the future?
For myself, I want to see Steemit get to full fruition with all it's branches and different use cases.

I'm an adventurer, an observer...I'm here to serve. If there is anybody I can help out with something, just ask me. I'm flexible. Even though I do a lot of things, I also get a lot of things done. So I don't want anyone to have a reason not to contact me, thinking I'm too busy. I love being able to help people out, especially on Steemit.

You are able to cast your witness votes by going here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you want to vote for @fystikken, you can put his witness account name of @fyrst-witness into the text box at the bottom and hit vote.

Image Sources:
Fyrstikken's Dogs
Peruvian Jungle
Peruvian Beach