Meet Our Witnesses - @good-karma

By far the most important choice you will make on Steemit is who you nominate to be witnesses. Everyone has 30 witness votes to place and should take the time to learn about the many great witnesses on this platform. Over the course of the next month I will be introducing you to many of the witnesses here in our community and trying to get to know each one of them a little better. Often time we just see usernames and don't really know the people behind the @ symbol. So I've decided to do what I can to shed some more light on who are witnesses are and why they deserve our votes. If you are completely new to the witness process, go check out the Steemit FAQ Page. If you aren't sure how to vote for witnesses, go check out the Witness Page. On that page you can click on any of the top witnesses names to find out a little more information about them. If you want to see other witnesses outside the top 50, you can check out the SteemDB Witness Page. I can't stress this enough, Every steemian needs to take some time and get to know who our witnesses are and what they are doing to help make the Steem community better.

Today I want to introduce you to Feruz, who is one of the top witnesses on the Steemit platform. Currently ranked number number 7 in witness voting, Feruz goes by the username @good-karma. Having amassed a whopping 11,000 followers in the year and a half he has been on the platform, @good-karma is very active in the Steemit community. One of his biggest projects is Esteem. If you don't know what Esteem is, I highly recommend clicking on the link and checking it out. For those of you that have been on the platform for a while, you will know that steemit does not have a working app and when you open it on your phone, it can be clunky and difficult to use. This is where Esteem comes it. Everything you see here on steemit, made into a sweet app, with a great user interface and all the same abilities that you find with the PC version. Here is a direct quote from the man himself, @good-karma sums up nicely, exactly what Esteem is:

For those who find eSteem related post first time and don't know what eSteem is: It is first mobile application on top of Steem! eSteem offers some of the unique features (Bookmarking, Post Drafts, Image upload/capture, Personal Gallery, Notifications, Activity manager, many more tweaks, features) for mobile users!
ESteem supports multi-currency where you can see post rewards in any currency you like (BTC, USD, EUR, RUB, GBP, JPY, KRW, INR, CNY etc.), multi-language (58+) where you can use app in any language you are familiar with, multi-account where you can add more than one account and easily change between accounts.

If you haven't checked out Esteem, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do yourself a favor and go download this app. If you do a lot of your posting, commenting, curating on your phone or tablet, you NEED this app. Any questions you have about the app can probably be answered on the FAQ Page

I recently had a chance to sit down with @good-karma to ask him a few questions. Some questions were directly pertaining to Steemit and the role he plays in the community, while others were more about him as a person. Below is a transcript of our interview, I hope you enjoy it:

• What is the biggest mistake new users make when joining steemit?

I think, just like every one of use, new users come with expectation of earning money quickly. But that's not how system works, you should put some effort to build your niche.

• Financial advice aside, what ceiling value do you think steem has in terms of price?

Hmm, I don't do predictions on price but on technical levels platform has huge potential.

• For steemians who don't know much about witnesses, can you give a layman explanation of what it is that witnesses do?

Witnesses are people who has technical knowledge how to setup and handle Steem nodes, as well as do their best to support community and its growth.

• Do you ever see any coin coming close to rivaling the power of bitcoin?

Well, recently bitcoin cash tried to challenge bitcoin's position and I believe soon Ethereum might do the same. There will be many in future.

• Some people have called crypto currency the internet 2.0 while other think it is just a hiccup in evolution, what are your thoughts on the future of crypto?

Current financial system needed changes and I believe crypto currencies will solve a lot issues with it and future of currency is digital/crypto.

• What is one thing that most people don't know about you?

I think most don't know that I am vegan for more than 7 years now.

• With so many other tools and sites having been created for the steemit user, if you had to pick one, which would be the most useful for a new steemian to use.

There are multiple projects on top of Steem that I really like, different front-ends, bots, services, etc. Recent project Utopian is one of the most useful tools to the platform.

• In 5 sentences or less, tell steemians why you deserve their vote.

I believe steemians should choose witnesses who is active on the platform and engage with users and knows issues/solutions and offer help, suggestions to new comers. By keeping that in mind, should you see me being active and developing for the good of the platform, please vote my witness. In other case, you have a voice to choose 30 dedicated witnesses that will secure the network.

Once again, I'd like to thank @good-karma for taking the time to have a discussion with me. I think it is of paramount importance that we know who the leaders in our community are and through this series of interviews I hope to shed some light on the people behind the proverbial mask.

This is the second interview in my "Get to Know Your Witnesses" series. To view the first interview, done with @rival,

Click Here

Be sure to follow along as I take you down our witness page and shed some light on a few of the brightest minds in the Steem community. If you have a witness that you would like me to interview in the future, feel free to leave a comment below or you can reach me on both steemit.chat or Discord. Thanks for reading.