Here’s a short recap of what happened last week on the witness layer of my activity here on Steemit

Steem Witness Node

• monitored my seed and witness nodes, uptime 100%
• secured a colocation facility in Bucharest for the two servers I intend to dedicate to Steemit (will start the actual moving sometime this week, last week all hosting providers were swamped with Black Friday)
• solved a glitch which prevented my price feed to get published, now everything is working 100%
• I will fully support hard fork 16 when it will be released, meaning tomorrow, Tuesday November 22nd. I'm actually looking forward to it, especially to the equihash mining algorithm.

Advocating and Coaching

During the 4th VOP dedicated to the Blockchain (a weekly event I host at Connect Hub, in Bucharest) I made a very detailed presentation of Steemit, including the proposed changes in the economical model. The presentation was very well received and I can say I even had a “conversion” (we’ll see below what is all about).

From the feedback I gathered at the event, Steemit is still a very advanced topic, moderately difficult to grasp even for people well versed in the crypto world. The most difficult part seems the be the governance / DPOS part. But we’re getting there.

One of the “conversions” I made is a friend who is starting a 30 days writing challenge, similar to the one I tried when I first landed in Steemworld. A few days ago I had a one to one coaching session with him in which I explained all the ins and outs of the publishing side. He is at his 4th article right now, and you can follow him here @ciprian.homm. All content is Romanian, and hopefully that will help with adoption in other languages as well.

Another one to one coaching session was done with a friend who wants to become a Golos “delegate” (which is basically a witness). You can follow him here @iurii. We had a one hour long session in which I explained, to the best of my knowledge, what a witness does, how to setup a node and everything that comes with it. His decision is made and very soon he will secure his seed and node servers. I will be very happy to help him with the technical part, that would be a good opportunity to learn about the Golos ecosystem as well.

As I already said, I continued to advocate Steemit at the Vertical Open Connect Blockchain events and I will continue to do so constantly. The 5th edition of VOP, which will be this evening, will host our first attempt to deploy a smart contract on Ethereum, in order to create a crypto-currency mapping the activities in the hub. I even bought the domain name hubcoin.cash so the plans are quite ambitious.

Content

Last week I wrote two pieces related to Steemit, one announcing the delay of the hardfork 16 (which was expected on 16th of November) and one about the bots and their usefulness (and unfairness) on Steemit.

• Hardfork 16 Will Not Happen Today - Temporary Delay
• Useful and Unfair - The Rise Of Bots On Steemit

Both articles were well received.

I also stated my opinion about another round of proposed changes, in a commentary made on this post Proposed Upgrade for Blockchain Incentives. In short, in the comment I'm saying that I am curious how the expansion of Steemit in other websites will affect the governance model. Also I'm wondering if this is the right moment to start this expansion, given the age of the Steemit community (less than half a year and less than 15k users).

Overall, I think expansion will be a good thing, though, if only we could manage to do it with an addition model rather than a competing model (adding communities with different types of content first, rather than communities that will compete at the social media level). Competition at the blockchain level is one thing, and it's very good, whereas competition at the social media level, at the content level, is another thing, and that will probably mean the end of the Steemit community as we know it, given its size and age.

Apps

I continued to work on Zentasktic, improving various UI aspects. Expect a full update on the @zentasktic account in the next few days.

I also secured a few other domain names related to steemit: steem.city, steem. one and steem.supply. I have a pretty clear idea about what to do on steem.city, but the other two were just too good not to be bought, so I'll see what I can do with them later.

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With that being said, I’m looking forward to Hardfork 16, I think it will shake things out a bit, it may upset some, it may make others happy, but, overall, it will be a healthy addition to the ecosystem.

If you have any proposals or suggestions about my activity as witness, please leave a comment, I’d be happy to answer.

At the moment of writing this article, I’m on the 52nd position of the witness queue. You can vote me here:

https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Since my username doesn't appear on the list, you'll have to manually enter in the form field below the list, and then press "vote".
Thank you.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.