RE: Witness Questionnaire - A Solution for Voter Confusion (@timcliff's responses)

@thecryptofiend created a witnesses questionnaire for the witnesses to answer, so that the community could learn more about them and have a better idea of who they were voting on for witness. I think this is a great idea! Here are my answers to the questionnaire.

Technical Questions

1. In a few sentences or less please explain the role of a witness in the Steemit/Steem ecosystem as you understand it.
   -The primary duty of a witness is to produce and sign blocks for the Steem blockchain. This is the way that everything happening in Steemit gets accurately recorded and tracked on the blockchain.
   -Witnesses are also elected leaders of the community. They have a responsibility to grow the Steem/Steemit community by using their skills/talents (as well as witness funds) in ways that benefit the community.
   -They are the final deciders as to whether or not hard-forks occur. If there are controversial or bad changes being proposed, the witnesses can put a stop to them by refusing to pick up the new version.
   -They also publish the price of Steem, which is used to determine the payout of SBD->Steem conversions, as well as the Steem marketcap - which determines the total amount of rewards available in the reward pool.
   -It is a very important position, with a lot of power.

2. What are the most important qualities for a witness to have?
   -The most important quality in my opinion is trust. We are all putting our trust in the witnesses to run the blockchain, public accurate price feeds, and make good decisions about the direction to take the community.
   -A very close second is that you believe they have the communities best interest at heart, and you agree with the direction they want to take the community in.

3. How do you fulfil those qualities?
   -It is hard to ask someone for their trust. Especially someone you only know over the internet. All that I can really say is that I am the type of person who tries to do the right thing. I don't always know what that is (which can get into some interesting philosophical conversations) - but that is what I am at least aiming for. Beyond that, I recommend that you try to get to know me and see what type of person I am :)
   -For the second quality (having the communities best interest at heart), I always try to be very transparent in what I am doing, what I believe, and what I am trying to achieve. I believe if anyone that looks at my record, they will be able to tell that I care deeply about the community, and want Steem/Steemit to succeed!

4. Is there anything beyond this that you feel makes you a better witness candidate than the average person?
   -There really are a lot of good other witnesses running. It's tough competition! To be honest, I feel that a lot of people have me beat as far as technical ability is concerned. I have a technical background, but these days I'm more on the 'project management' side than actual coding. I still know enough to be dangerous, but I am not a tech wiz :)
   -Really my best ability is to be able to look at the current situation, determine what the biggest issues are that need attention, and then direct resources towards that. Right now I see that as getting the Steemit to work well for the "average user" so that we can truly go "mainstream". Because of this, I have been focusing on things like the wish list, and other initiatives that I feel are going to make Steemit more appealing to regular users.

5. What kind of hardware setup are you using and is it your own local hardware or rented?
   The specs of my server are:
   -Operating System: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
   -Processor: AMD 3.1 GHz, 6 cores
   -RAM: 32 GB DDR3
   -Hard Drive: 3 TB
   -The server is externally hosted.
   

6. What if any contingencies do you have in case of an emergency or server failure?
   There is a way to disable my witness account, and make it so that it doesn't assign any blocks for me to produce/sign. Currently I only have one witness server, so if I run into an issue - my contingency plan is to disable my witness account until the issue is resolved. This way, it will always choose one of the other backup witnesses rather than my account. If I get closer to the top 19, then I plan to purchase an additional witness server, so I can fail-over to a backup site and keep producing blocks, even if there is an issue.

7. Do you think the current compensation for a witness is fair? If not what do you think would be fair compensation?
   -Yes. Until witnesses get higher in the list, they are paying for their servers out their of pocket, but I think that is fair. Witnesses are supposed to be doing things for the community, and this is one way to demonstrate that. If you are involved in the community in other ways (posting, curating, etc.) then that should provide enough to cover the costs.
   -As you get voted up, you start to make more. It is not a lot more, but it starts to at least get close to balancing out the costs. I like how the more you get approved by the community for what you are doing, the higher you get in the list, and the more you can potentially get paid.
   -The top 19 get paid quite a bit. It is in Steem Power, but it is a lot of Steem Power. If they kept it all for themselves as payment, it would be a very high paying job. Because they are getting paid so much though, there is pretty much an expectation from the community that they use a lot of it for projects that benefit the community in some way. So not all of it is considered "payment".

8. What percentage (or fixed amount) of witness earnings should be kept and what percent invested back into the steem platform?
   It depends. It kind of ties into the last question. I think that each witness should make a choice as to what seems fair compensation for the work they are doing, and then try to use the rest to benefit the community in some way. It is really up to the community / voters to decide if the value they are getting from each witness is worth the amount the witnesses are getting paid. I think that expecting the witnesses to work for free and give everything back to the community is unreasonable, but if a witness were keeping most/all of the payment to themselves, I would probably question that.

9. How do you intend to use your witness earnings?
   My current plan (if I make it into the top 19) is to use a large portion of my earnings to fund bounties that add new features and functionality to the Steemit website.

Current Witness Questions

1. What challenges or problems have you faced in your role as witness?
   -Honestly, I was lucky enough to have a lot of help from all the great witnesses that came before me and paved the way. I did not run into any major challenges. Finding a good hosting company with an affordable server (which also had good specs) took a bit of research.
   -It was interesting to try and verify that my witness server was properly up and running when I first set it up though. I'm the type of person that likes to be 100% sure before I push the "GO" button, but with the witness application - there was no way to know it was working until the system assigned the first block to my account. At that point, it would either work or miss the block. As a brand new witness, I did not get any new blocks for about a week - so I had to just kept checking back to see if any had been assigned yet. Yesterday I got my first block assigned, and I produced/signed it successfully, so yea! It was a long time of waiting though to see if it worked :)

2. What other types of decisions do you think as a witness you should be involved in voting on?
   To some extent the witnesses are already involved in a lot of decisions by approving (or rejecting) the hard-forks. I think what the question is getting at though is if there are other things that could be parameterized, and changed by the witnesses without a hard-fork. I'm not really sure where I stand on this yet. To some extent, I think that having a lot of stuff static unless there is an approved hard-fork might be a good thing. It adds predictability and stability to the system.

3. Are there any changes to the witness/mining system or structure that you feel would improve the system? Why?
   -About the only item that I was going to bring up was the mining queue being dominated by two users, but this seems to have been addressed in this post. Other than that, I don't have any improvements to suggest at this time.

Community Questions

1. What do you think makes Steemit special and worth supporting?
   -I think Steem/Steemit is going to revolutionize the way we interact with each other.
   -The community we have here is awesome!

2. How much do you use Steemit on average per week?
   An unhealthy amount :)

3. What is your favorite type of post?
   -I actually really like posts that talk about Steem/Steemit. Not the 'circle-jerk' type, but more the 'I just started a new project', or 'here is something useful that we all can use' types.
   -I also really enjoy looking through good art/photography posts.
   -Thought provoking posts are really good too :)
   -I also love watching interviews with Dan and Ned!

4. Do you have a specific favorite post you would like to mention or link to? (Feel free to give a shout out to the author)
   Steemit Succeeds if We Make it Succeed - Analysis to Help Yourself and Steemit Grow in Quality from @krnel is a great post!

5. What kind of posts do you dislike?
   Steemit Whining. I really don't like posts that just complain about things that are wrong with Steem/Steemit. (The whales have all the power. Communication from Steemit, Inc. is bad. Features are missing. Flags are evil. Etc. Etc. Etc.) Steemit is still in beta. There are still a lot of kinks to work out. What you see today is not the final product. We are all here trying to turn this into the community of our dreams, and it is going to take some time to get there. In the meantime, complaining about how things suck is not really doing anything to improve the situation. If the post is proactively trying to solve a problem, then I am interested in reading it, but if it is just complaining for the sake of complaining - I am not.

6. How do you feel about the Steemit governance structure?
   -Most of the power today is still in the hands of the early adopters. I am OK with that. I feel that Steem/Steemit is still in its early stages, and the founders are working on transforming their vision into reality. At the end of the day, this project is Dan and Ned's baby. They are going to hold the reigns and guide the ship in the direction they feel is best for a while. As time goes on, they will slowly be giving away more and more of their influence to other members of the community.
   -Eventually I expect the power to balance out more, and a lot of the current dolphins to become whales. If we are still as centralized as we are today in 3 years, I would have an issue with that - but I don't think it will be like this in 3 years.

7. How would you improve Steemit?
   -I don't expect the price of Steem to go up much until we can make Steemit.com more attractive for "average users", and Steem Power to be more attractive to potential investors. These are two areas that I am focusing on right now.
   -I also spend a lot of time talking to Steemians who have issues/frustrations with the way things currently are, and trying to help them either find a way to improve the situation, or change their way of looking at things.

Personal Questions

1. How did you get into cryptocurrencies?
   My brother (@dogguy) got me interested in Bitcoin several years ago. He has been heavily involved in a lot of cryptocurrencies, and was the one who told me about Steem/Steemit. Thanks @dogguy! :)

2. What hobbies or interests do you have outside of Steemit and cryptocurrencies?
   I like to go shopping. I enjoy playing poker. Watching TV shows can be really fun. I try to go on walks often. I also like to cook :)

3. What is your favorite movie genre?
   Sci-Fi

4. What is your favorite movie or movies?
   Avatar is probably my favorite movie. I also really like Inception and The Matrix.

5. What is your favorite musical genre?
   I like most music. Pop music is my favorite. I also like classical.

6. What are you favorite bands/albums?
   Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Kesha, Enya

7. What is your favorite book (fiction or non-fiction) and do you have a favorite author?
   -"Ender's Game" is my favorite book.
   -I really enjoyed the whole "Sword of Truth" series by Terry Goodkind.

8. What is your favourite TV show?
   "Stranger Things" It is a new series on Netflix. If you haven't seen it yet, you really should watch it!

9. Which is your favourite Star Wars movie from the original trilogy?
   I will probably lose some votes over this, but I'm not a big Star Wars fan. People say you can like both, but I'm more of a "Trekkie" (Star Trek).

10. Margarine or butter?
    Margarine

11. The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?
    Neither

12. Have you ever tried Marmite?
    Never tried it. I had to google it to see what it was :)

13. Are there any weird facts that you would like to share with everyone?
    There was a point in my life where I almost became ordained as a Buddhist monk.

14. Is there anything else that you would like other people to know about you?
    I am really into Religions. I don't like the control part (at all). I also feel that most of the major religions have gotten very twisted over time. The stories about the religious figureheads though (Jesus, Buddha, etc.) and the things that they tried to teach to humanity through their lives are fascinating to me.

That's it!

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If you want to support me for witness, please vote for me here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses