A bit of soul searching, and my resignation as a witness

in #witness-category7 years ago

During last Christmas, there have been some discrepancies between the feed values I was publishing for bitCNY, and the "correct" value that was expected of me by the Chinese community. I am not going to discuss what the proper value should have been, as it doesn't matter because the market always rules in the end, but I'd rather want to highlight this fact as it made me realize that I've been having a hard time lately to be a proper witness, and react timely and appropriately when needed.

I am originally a developer, but still decided to start on the path of becoming a witness when BitShares was originally released, even though this also required some sysadmin skills. Although I have been able to do it for all those years, it has been taking a significant amount of my time. There is also the fact that being a witness requires one to be on call 24/7 and I can't really afford to do this any longer as I have a family that also requires that from me, and a job which I can't realistically drop in the coming months.

One could argue that the situation is better than a few years ago, when chains (BitShares, Steem) would stop during planned upgrades, or in the middle of the night due to some unexpected circumstances, however this was also part of the thrill of being a witness.
Reviving a frozen chain is one of the most intense, stressful and rewarding activities I have done in my life. In those times I felt like we were surgeons in an emergency room trying to bring some very important person back to life. :) Today, witness responsibilities still include maintaining a properly running server at all times, but the tools ecosystem has developed and the stability of the chains is much better now, so witnesses somehow "have it easier" in that respect (although there are now scalability issues), but they also need to assume other roles now (community, development, etc...) and cannot defend their position on server maintenance only anymore.

I have also felt that I started to burn out due to trying to do too many things at once, and the motivation made place to a sense of defeat and apathy, explained by the fact that I wouldn't be able to do everything I had planned to.

I have tried to think of all the ways that I could to keep my witness(es) running and provide an adequate level of professionalism, however I have spread myself too thin and realistically cannot do that any longer. It is in light of this that I announce the following:

I officially resign as a witness on the chains where I have been witnessing: BitShares, Steem, Peerplays, Muse

I will still keep them running for a week or two before turning them off definitely, so that people have time to remove their votes.

I am not going away!

Obviously, I haven't lost interest in crypto, and keep feeling that extremely interesting times lie ahead of us, so my plan is to come back to a more active role in the community whenever I have managed to make some time/room for it in real life. Although I will stop my witness activities, I will still keep doing the following:

Final thoughts

First, I'd like to apologize to people towards which I have been very little responsive, or even sometimes plainly ignored / couldn't respond to in a timely manner, but more than making excuses, what I want to say is:

I want to thank everyone that voted for me or supported me in any way during all these years,

I want to thank all the witnesses on those chains, past and present, I really had the feeling of being part of something special, and this wouldn't have been possible without you,

and finally, I wanted to thank @dan for creating this technology, which has kept me awake so many nights in the past years, and opened my eyes to a future that I had given up on, a future where the people will have (technological) ways to make the world a better place and achieve freedom.

Cheers!

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That was a really awesome resignation letter Nico, and I am not alone in saying how we will miss you and the contributions you've made.

I've felt this has been awhile coming, and I'm very happy for you to realize it and find a way to relieve the stress that has only increased in your life over the last year or so.

Really makes me wish I had attended the Steemfest in Lisbon last year to meet you in person. We've been partners in this effort to restore freedom for years, literally and philosophically. You're one of the pillars I've been inspired by to get back into coding, albeit with some new limits to curtail my stress level!

Take care of yourself my friend and please stay in touch as you have the time.

Thanks for the kind words, we've indeed had a good run together, and you're in the top of the list of persons that I want to get to meet in person at some point in my life. Will definitely want to go to SF3, so that might be the occasion ;)
And thanks to you too for what you've been doing, it's been refreshing to see that even in the face of changing environment, people like you have never lost sight of the philosophical and ideological tenets on which all of this has been originally built. Given that technology is neutral, we always need watchkeepers that ensure it is used to do good and not evil, especially since blockchain technology is so powerful. Really looking forward to how that ship's going to be steered in the future.

i want to bring witness to my d 0 w/(h) e (a)d https://steemit.com/g0fig/@xubrnt/ned-steemit

and opened my eyes to a future that I had given up on, a future where the people will have (technological) ways to make the world a better place and achieve

Thank you for everything Wackou! I feel also the same in regard to what Dan's created.

Thanks! We really do live in interesting times.

i want to bring witness to my d 0 w/(h) e (a)d https://steemit.com/g0fig/@xubrnt/ned-steemit

Thank YOU.

Sad to see you stop as a witness, but glad you'll still be around. I appreciate all the support you have given me from day 1 since I started witnessing myself. I wish you the best of luck with your other projects.

I'm glad I did support you, if everyone that joins would be as active and engaged as you've been, it would be a much different place!

Thank you for your service.

You've always seemed honourable to me and maintained it which is incredibly important. Best of luck with your future endeavours.

Hearfelt thanks, I've always tried to be, and will strive to keep it that way in the future.

Wololo!

(RandoHealer has healed this post because you have been randomly selected from the whitelist. Lucky!)

Thanks for everything! You did a great job!

You've contributed a lot more than many other witnesses. I'm glad you'll stay around. :-)

Thank you! Coming from you, it means a lot to me ;)

I am only 3 days old and came here as i wanted to see or know why such a high placed person on witness list would deactivate the account.
Hope your friend is doing well months after he deactivated. From reading all the comments it sounds like he was a nice human. I wish him all the best and that his dreams do come true.

You too @cyrano

Thanks for supporting my blog and for supporting the community in general.

Thank you @wackou for your outstanding service both here at Steemit and at Bitshares.

Hopefully time will avail itself to you and you will be able to come back to Steemit and Bitshares in a big way.

Wishing you and yours all the best.

Cheers.

Appreciate your kind note regarding @dan.

Hey @wackou, are you stopping your Bitshares (specifically hertz) price feed publishing? I'm comfortable trusting you as a non-witness to publish hertz price feeds, if you're still interested.

Cheers, take it easy! :)

hey @cm-steem, sorry for taking so long to respond, been a bit away from the computer ;) and yes please, I'd like to continue publishing feed prices for Hertz, for a couple of reasons. One, I still have a feed I can publish so I can keep working on my code (it's hard to test feed publishing if I can't actually publish!), and two, I really love the Hertz asset as it shows what BitShares is actually capable of. Everyone has heard about crypto assets pegged to the USD or some other fiat currency, but pegging to something like Hertz, or Hero, or Bit20, or any other formula-based asset, algorithm-based asset, market index (or anything, really!) is really one of the fundamental strength I see in the platform, and I'm glad I can help with that. Not sure if a lot of people know or even remember, but the title of the original whitepaper was BitShares A Peer-to-Peer Polymorphic Digital Asset Exchange, which is very direct and to the point. The concept of polymorphic digital asset is really brilliant once one fully understands what it entails!

Thanks wackou 👍

Great gesture @cm-steem. Hertz is looking nice by the way.

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