Witness Update : August 4 - August 11

Good News, Everyone!

That's one of my favorite lines from Futurama. The professor, who, I must add, is not modeled after me by Groenig. I've never been in contact with him once. Hard as that may be to believe.

This week has been a flurry of events working on various initiatives in my spare time (real-world job and commitments as well as an upcoming wedding) as well as doing code-review and an algorithm review.

In addition, I talk with lots of people in Steemit.chat to hear their concerns about the platform or even potential phishing sites (no, I will not name it here, as it's not confirmed if the site is phishing yet as it is currently offline, but a trusted user claims that after moving past the first page, the site asked for your steemit password) and bringing these concerns to the other witnesses.

Code Review and Algorithmic Review

As @arhag mentions in his latest witness update, he has identified, what he believes (and I as well), the attack vector that supercomputing has performed on the mining queue.

Although, I did not come up with the (supposed) solution, I contributed to the discussions on the attack vector, old and new algorithms, and the (evolving -- maybe it's stabilized by now) new implementation (located in the develop branch on github).

Ongoing Initiative(s)

Some of you may have missed that I am trying to encourage a #fiction writing community. To this end, I have started a new account called @steemwriters and put out a post reaching out to the #photography community to create a synergestic effect between fiction writers and photographers.

I seeded the @steemwriters account with 500 SBD from my own pocket. An undetermined amount of witness funds will be allocated to this project randomly.

In addition, this account will also begin to pick out bi-weekly fiction authors and stories that are not included in the #descriptionsonthespot weekly contests to highlight the creativity of our community.

#artistsunite !

I also have plans for steemwriters.com.

The dev I have hired (and paid for half the work) is still working on steemgrants and steemscholarships, too. No big updates on that. Progress is coming along. But, I hope that this will be an independently built interface for the Steem blockchain. I really cannot say more as I'm not a web developer and dunno if some of the pieces from the steemit source will be cherry picked or not.

Steemit.Chat Mod Volunteer

I have also been asked to moderate steemit.chat.

Secret Projects

Yes. I do have a few of these that are not being announced until they are further along. Stay tuned.

Other

As mentioned earlier, I try listen to all of you. I've had numerous people contact me in chat about problems they see with the platform -- lack of visibility, whales not downvoting, etc. As an example, see this post by @owdy.

If you contacted me and I didn't respond, don't fret. I'm busy. Please try again later. Probably prefacing the message with a "I tried to talk with you earlier, but you didn't respond." Especially if it is a witness matter.

Warning: If it's a message on soliciting votes, I may or may not ignore it.