morning I am heading out to a Bitcoin ATM in Lelystad, a small city east of Amsterdam.

https://www.google.nl/maps/place/SATOS/@52.5060273,5.4751655,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x282ab0157b67a870?sa=X&nogmmr=1

I have a @blocktrades address set up to convert bitcoin to Steem Power, and hopefully by this afternoon there will be about €1000 worth more in there.

Fingers crossed, because so far I have spent nearly 3 weeks failing to find any way to buy any kind of crypto. Amsterdam does not seem to like bitcoin very much...

Plans for running a Witness

I am currently very keen to get things moving, and I have been obstructed so many different ways from doing anything much for the last 3 months.

I put aside all my ongoing things last night in order to make some decisions. I don't like how little I can do, and it is difficult to get into a good frame of mind and physical situation to do anything, be it writing for Steem or coding. I considered whether since I have enough money, to go back east to Novi Sad, or Sofia, if this was viable, and while I can get myself a place to live for 3 months, money left over would be only enough for me to get a job ASAP and earning money to keep up with expenses. My dream of having a baby data centre and development lab is not possible on this budget.

So my mind moved to the question of whether I can hire a couple of cloud servers to run a witness. I am not that interested in mining, it is not easy to make a decent profit, and in my opinion anyway, mining is going to be history within 5 years. DPoS with consensus issuance without PoW will take over. I think a Steem witness, both for thinking forwards and being proactive, and the fact I have over 600 followers now, I might have a reasonable chance to make the top 19.

Several existing elected witnesses are directing their witness earnings to fund development projects, and this is what I would like to do.

So, I discovered that I can probably afford to rent a couple of Amazon AWS EC2 servers. I have a sufficient computer to manage the servers, and I certainly can build and configure a Steem witness as good as anyone.

So, after I hopefully do a massive power up this morning, I am going to start working on getting a witness running, and when it is ready and running, I can start evangelising about the manifold benefits of me being an elected witness :)

Update

So, I found it pretty easy, and the ATM was not working due to it not being able to connect to the wifi. But the nice lass there was able to do it with their machine, though I had to enter the address manually. I used a blocktrades conversion address for SP and within 15 minutes, my SP is now over 12000. YAY!

Now to go back to the 'Dam and start working on setting up a witness!

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