has been a big day for all the Witnesses with the upcoming HF17/18 tomorrow, and I have been very busy not just getting my servers upgraded, but also finishing off my compleat witness management system. It has helped me get the process finished quicker although testing some of the parts of the scripts caused unwanted repeated replays.

My witness servers

My primary node is now up and running and activated, the feed setter is running but the secondary is finishing a replay and after that I will activate the failover script and be able to put it to bed, just check up on it daily to make sure nothing has gone amiss, or the failover has activate requiring me to restart and possibly replay the primary, which is a big relief.

The Forkening

I am very pleased that the hardfork has been amended to the satisfaction of the rest of the witnesses, because now we will see how this new 7 day payout period works out, and many useful features including assigning rewards for posts to other accounts, creating accounts by irrevocably delegating SP (this will make it a lot easier for me to implement the Sybil Workshop when I get it going) and because I have now got a nice neat system to manage my servers, I can devote more energy and time towards my witness services.

My Witness fiscal policy

As always, I set my SBD interest rate at zero, because I don't think we need any more SBD than we have until at least the price of Steem goes up a lot higher, and the pegging algorithm still makes too much in my opinion.

I am also converting every bit of SBD that I win in rewards to help keep the debt load down, as I think that it's costing us all about 13% per year, which is way too much.

My price feed is set on a roughly hourly basis, and I think I can say that after this evening my infrastructure is ready for top 19 service so if you have been holding back from voting for my Witness because up to now I have been in a process of fiddling, fixing and breaking it, that is more or less now finished.

What's next?

I will be taking a little bit of well-earned rest for the next couple of days, and within the next two weeks I will be in my own apartment, hopefully, probably after next Monday when my next power down payment comes through.

I am not powering down because I want to get my money out of Steem, but rather, because I wanted to get out of Amsterdam where I was unable to maintain good workflow and my progress was very slow.

Because I need the money to get set up here, as soon as I have a surplus I will be stopping this, because Steem Power is a very good investment and I would like to ultimately be able to more or less cover my base costs with it, which means I need to try and keep it increasing, ideally to the point where a single power down pays all my bills for a month if I need to.

Self-assigned tasks

Of course, relaxing isn't gonna keep me happy for log, so in the next day or two I will resume developing my website and as a matter of priority, get the Sybil Workshop operational and accepting and processing orders. After that is done I am not sure what I will be doing next.

I want to make a payments tumbler system, though my initial concept of managing them directly myself as a service, I am leaning more towards writing instead a peer to peer tumbling system that will allow a larger number of nodes in the mesh, each one directly being paid for running the service as they bounce the payments around (which is going to be an interesting puzzle how to secure it against bad behaviour).

New partnership in developing blockchain applications/systems

Outside of that, I am now working closely with @faddat to develop a blockchain system he has been working on, and, importantly, learning how to program network servers in the Go language, which is highly optimised for this type of application. As things happen with that, I will be writing reports from time to time what we are doing.

Note that this blockchain system is going to be promiscuous, and is intended to act mainly as an intermediary system to link many blockchains together, and a core element of the project is building a simple piece of hardware that @faddat is in the process of procuring production partners to build the hardware, so that people can buy these devices and start earning tokens on the network by providing services within it.

I don't know in much depth yet what the system involves because since being inducted into the project I have been very busy getting my management system and servers ready for the fork.

I have some big ideas of my own about a blockchain system, and perhaps after I have got up to speed with Go and @faddat's system, I may start working on a blockchain based replacement for Tor in which you can get paid for hiding other people's traffic from large scale surveillance systems, which is just the beginning of a full dark chain that will incorporate and monetise anti-espionage services and protect private commerce from potential criminal and/or government (ah, but I repeat myself) interference.

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

Vote #1 l0k1

_{Go to steemit.com/~witnesses to cast your vote by typing l0k1 into the text entry at the bottom of the leaderboard.}

_{(note, my username is spelled El Zero Kay One or Lima Zero Kilo One, all lower case)}