Witness @prc Update #3: April 12th, 2018 and my response to my nomination from @sircork for the "Witness-blocks challenge"

Hi Steemian friends! :)

This is my Witness Update, going through all the details about my Witness adventure, and for those of you who don't know me yet, here are some photos in my favorite playground: my music studio! :)

I am a life long Software Developer, working on Blockchain for last years on several projects, but I am also a DJ and Electronic Music Producer, my alter-ego "Kolatz" that you can browse for if interested... :)

I am also the creator of DSound, which has grown so much these last two months, like from 3000+ to 7500+ users, and quality wise, as subjective as it is, the growth has been maintained at the expected pace! :)

If you got curious about DSound, please check it out: https://dsound.audio

Update #3

I am so proud to have grown my fellow Steemians support and now counting with 778 people that vote on my witness and that believe in me and my work for Steem! Thank you guys so much! But votes count don't directly represent ranking places, so I went up from #42 to #40 and then down to #44 on the Witness rank during these months...

But, I continue on the top 50 Steem Witnesses list. And I am so proud of this! I will continue to deliver stability on the network, and my commitment on my Steem blockchain related projects and, most of all, to bring Music enthusiasts, Artists and Portuguese people to our favorite blockchain is higher than ever! :)

My biggest supporters in this journey are:

@pumpkin
@roadscape
@jerrybanfield
@xaero1
@rok-sivante
@noisy
@dtube
@blockchained
@cob
@themonetaryfew
@minnowsupport
@bleepcoin
@dan-atstarlite
@sircork
@d-pend
@dsound
@steevc
@marketingmonk
@soundlegion
@jaybird

Thanks so much guys! I'll do my best for the community and to make you proud of your vote in me...

Technical Infrastructure

Related to technical stuff, my servers are rocking! This last month just had some network issues and that costed me my first 2 missed blocks... :(

My dedicated server boxes are still with the following specs, but planning to upgrade to 64GB RAM when needed. All boxes are behind firewalls, IDS and power redundancy systems. The server characteristics are subject to upgrade or revision as needed.

Witness node	Dedicated Server
CPU	Intel i5 4x core 2.5 GHz
RAM	32GB RAM DDR4
Disks	256GB SSD
Connection	Gigabit over optical fiber backbone
Power	Redundant + UPS
Location	EU - Portugal

---

Backup node	Dedicated Server
CPU	Intel i5 4x core 2.5 GHz
RAM	32GB RAM DDR4
Disks	256GB SSD
Connection	Gigabit over optical fiber backbone
Power	Redundant + UPS
Location	EU - Portugal

---

Seed node	Dedicated Server
host:port	seed.steem.prcolaco.com:2001
CPU	Intel i5 4x core 2.9 GHz
RAM	32GB RAM DDR3
Disks	256GB SSD
Connection	Gigabit over optical fiber backbone
Power	Redundant + UPS
Location	EU - Portugal

---

What I am working on

I am currently working on DSound first open source release, that will be out soon, and I am also working on many improvements and mainly on DSound uploaders to make them a reality really soon! I want to get DSound on @utopian-io so that all the community can participate and contribute features...

On the community side, plenty of work to do and arrangements to fulfill the demand of a 7500+ community that is growing by the hour, so many improvements have been made on the social media side and to keep DSound Discord healthy while growing... DSound is always improving and I count with many people helping me out now! :)

Witness-blocks challenge

I was nominated by @sircork (here) for this "Witness-blocks challenge" run by @guiltyparties, so the point is to have witnesses clarify what they do with their witness income earned by processing blocks on the STEEM blockchain.

Here is an excerpt explaining what @guiltyparties has asked:

We figured it'd be fun to challenge witnesses to share with their stakeholders and supporters where the revenue they generate for producing blocks is going.

The premise is simple. Let's say your witness got to process 20 blocks this month. That's about 19 SP. What did you do with it? What are you planning to do with it to benefit the STEEM ecosystem?

The Witness Blocks Challenge

1. Do something useful for others (ie. free delegation, account creation for others, etc.) with your witness blocks
2. Write a post about it
3. Tag it with #witness-blocks
4. Nominate a witnesses

and my nomination by @sircork:

I am supposed to nominate another witness for the "Witness-Blocks Challenge". I hate to put anyone on the spot for this, but a witness I feel deserves more attention and love is @prc, the creator of http://dsound.audio which I highly admire.

The idea is to explain how much are my block rewards and what do I do with that to help the community, so let's start by showing what are witness @prc block rewards:

Please keep in mind that my first months of witness were a lot different as climbing the STEEM witness ranking is not an easy task, and even worse for non political guys like me, who are result driven and not social stars... back then I only started producing blocks way after my witness server was working and then I was making between 1 and 6 blocks a day.

These last 2 months were the first ones where I was able to be on the top 50 witness ranking, meaning that my servers are now making between 20 and 24 blocks per day. This means that per month I got between 600 and 720 STEEM Power, which valued at average $1.7 per STEEM make up between $1000 and $1200 USD.

What does this mean? It means that these months were the first that I was able to make reasonable income to pay for part of my investment on the infrastructure needed to run my witness servers. But I am still under water not yet reaching ROI.

In fact I am glad that I made the decision of using my datacenter that I already run for other projects and building dedicated servers for this witness investment, because otherwise I would be tied to a monthly expense of nearly $1000 USD for my 3 servers and barely making enough to cover costs.

But, since I developed DSound and it is growing well, it complements quite well and I am able to keep all my witness STEEM Power without ever powering down. So all the SP that my @prc account holds, besides some 500 STEEM that I invested in the beginning of my Steem account, is the total income from my witness so far... at the time of this writing around 2200 STEEM Power.

So what do I do with that power, well not much, since I am only one of the few top 50 witnesses that are still a Minnow...

But I delegated since long time for Minnow Support Project, and now I am delegating to some community projects from Portugal, as well as doing the first contacts to organize a Steem meetup in Portugal, but the weather is not helping... by this time it was supposed to be already nice spring weather, but yesterday snow fell down in Lisbon, do you believe it?!

So I think that I made it quite clear about my earnings and what I am trying to push on the community side and to help others in the Steem ecosystem. If you need any further clarifications, please ask in the comments...

Now comes the part where I have to nominate another fellow witness to this "Witness-blocks challenge"... who will be?!

Well, I will go to top 20 witnesses... and one of the top 20 witnesses that I know less about is @xeldal, so I'll nominate witness #18 @xeldal for this "Witness-blocks challenge"! Please let us know more about you and what you do to help the Steem community...

Apropos of Minnow Support Project

I am sad to announce that I will be removing the proxy I had setup for the @minnowsupport account for witness voting.

For those of you who were not aware, back in October last year @aggroed, one of the folks behind Minnow Support Project, came out with this idea of getting the witnesses that are part of his project to proxy their witness vote to the @minnowsupport account and that account would vote them back and use remaining votes to help minnow witnesses like myself to get higher on the witness ranking. Check the announcement post here.

For me, at the time that I launched my witness, it was really the only hope I had because I was so new on the platform and not even DSound was helping raising awareness of my witness project, so I jumped right in and in November I wrote my application. You can check it here.

Almost 5 months have passed and I was the first and only witness that proxied my witness votes through that account!

Not even @aggroed proxied his votes, as the originator of the idea, let alone the other witnesses that he mentioned like @ausbitbank, @teamsteem, @someguy123, @followbtcnews, @drakos or @netuoso.

This means that, besides some Minnow Support Project accounts, no other bigger accounts joined this "public service" idea, not even the creator, so I'll drop it and probably also drop in the witness ranking due to some of the votes I'll lose due to this, but I don't care!

For me what matters is what is fair and just! And this is not that at all... Just a big lie or illusion! As you can check in the announcement and I quote:

@aggroed is going to switch the proxy so that he is proxying @minnowsupport. We'll collect the other Minnow Support Project community accounts and try to get them to proxy to @minnowsupport as well. Between @aggroed and @minnowsupport the vote is already over 100MV (check steemdb.com/~witnesses to get a sense of what that means). MSP hopes to have a vote in the near future worth in the hundreds of MV as others start to proxy the account as well to give the projects a stronger voice on the platform through a united voice.

So I just want to manifest my sadness for the complete absence of support that the people with more power in this platform have for the many that put hard work in making Steem what it is! Instead they are afraid of being taken out, I think...

Well, I never asked for anything in this platform. All I have, including the DSound delegation was given to me, not asked for. And for that I am hugely grateful! That allowed me to work the hardest I can on DSound and curation, and means a lot. But most of us - Minnows - could use a lot more support from the bigger stakes in this community... and all I see is less and less!

Sorry guys, but I had to let it out...

Conclusion

I think that my Steem Witness adventure is going really well. My servers were rock solid and keeping up with the growth pretty well! :)

My involvement with the community continued to grow. The stake of Steem I already hold, as well as what will come from witnessing, will still be vested as I already do, as I never powered down.

I want to witness Steem growth and success, so count on me to help make it happen! :)

And If you trust me and approve what I do in the Steem ecosystem, please give me your Witness vote to help me continue...

You can vote for me as a Steem Witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses

or if you cannot find me on the top 50 anymore (I hope you do, but votes come and go...)

or via cli_wallet with the command:
>>> vote_for_witness youraccount prc true true