A World of Witnesses! Geo-Diversity for a Safer Tomorrow!

My primary focus on Steem has and always will be developing business to create jobs for Steemians and demand for Steem, jobs are the lifeblood of any "real-world" economy and the same applies to Steem.

A part of good business practice is effective risk management; let's face it, we live in a bit of a crazy world, who would have predicted the 911 bombings, the latest bombings and killings in London and don't even talk about North Korea's missile production program which has the UN up in arms?

As Steem witness I thought it would be great to mix things up a bit and have a witness and seed node in a different continent where none, have gone before; enter "The first Steem witness in Africa!", located in South Africa the economic hub of Sub-Saharan Africa.

To run a beefy dedicated witness server in South Africa costs up to three times more than most other German or US based services, and when Steem was down below 20 cents I was losing a fair bit money monthly, but that's okay, I have had faith in Steem since I joined in June 2016 and am prepared to HODL through the good and the bad times.

Steem is the backbone of my business projects and the home and place of casual employ to many great writers in the greater Steem community, it has to be secured, that is non-negotiable.

By having globally geo-diverse witnesses we can ensure that the Steem blockchain will live on in the face of a global catastrophic event, which may be shrugged off by some, but always better to be safe than sorry. So why not vote for a few witnesses outside of the US and Germany!?

You can see a full list of registered Steem seed nodes at https://status.steemnodes.com/ which is a list maintained by witness @wackou.

Here witness nodes are listed with flags showing their country of locale, looking at the screenshot of my seed node below you can see the South African flag on the left.

You can use this list to find other great geo-diverse witnesses and then vote for them on the link https://steemit.com/~witnesses. There are only 21 listed "online" seeds at the time of writing and two that are "stuck", the rest appear offline, so support those that take the trouble to keep their seed nodes active.

By having a geo-diverse witness it allows other witnesses and RPC nodes to connect to your seed to get blocks rather than having to download them from the US, or EU; coupled with geo-diverse catastrophic event risk management, it really makes sense to spread witnesses around the world!

So if you want to secure the future of Steem and help create jobs on our blockchain, vote for @thecryptodrive witness, currently number 36 on the witness list.

P.S. - #suitupforsteem

Credits:
My new "Suit up for Steem" cartoon look, in business suit attire was created with the bitmoji.com app. Feel free to create your own avatar and Suit up for Steem today!