@ura-soul Witness Update #4 - The Calm Before We Become The Storm

ura-soul (75)in #witness-update • 7 years ago (edited)

My fourth witness update - Informing you of my recent activities and why to consider voting for me as one of your list of thirty supported witnesses on the Steem blockchain.

You can view my original witness application thread (from 22nd Oct. 2017) here for more details about me and more about what witnesses do for Steem and Steemit.com. I also now have a French language translation of that application too (great thanks for @roxane for the excellent translation job). More translations to come soon!

The Calm Before We Become The Storm

This year will surely be a huge year of change and growth for Steem, Steemit and cryptocurrency in general - with so many here having reaped great rewards from their early adoption and hard work in building and improving this platform, there will surely be a great deal of fresh creativity birthing exciting projects on the Steem blockchain - some of which I know about and many I do not. The rapid changes that continue to occur sometimes mean we need to have a space to breathe and take stock - which is where I feel collectively we are at the present time.

The near future holds Smart Media Tokens for Steem, the continuing rapid improvement of DTube (challenging Youtube) as well as the explosive potential for utopian.io (once the skeptical world of open source coders realises the potential for it and makes a beeline to the blockchain to get in on the action!). For me, this means the possibility of launching my own Smart Media Token for my own social network and so a lot of my time focused into testing, improving and supporting that emerging technology and potentially major boost for Steem.

I also have plans for a few other Steem projects that have all received mostly glowing support from the few I have told about them - so stay locked to this frequency for more soon. :)

My Recent Witness Activity

The major increases in price for Steem and SBDs in recent weeks has meant that not only have I been able to focus more into the world of crypto in general (freed from having to do other things to bring in money), but I have been overwhelmed by people asking questions about the situation and wanting help to learn how to use crypto coins in general. There were days recently when I was woken up by people literally knocking on my bedroom door asking for help and that went on all day until I went to bed! I never imagined this would occur!

Thankfully, my choice to invest in a large capacity witness server has paid off as I can easily support the ever increasing processing load needed to keep the Steem blockchain running. The increase in value of Steem has meant that even near the bottom of the list of active witnesses I now receive enough payout to cover the cost of that server and so I will be able to look at renting an extra server to host a Steem node at some point too. A Steem node allows users of the internet to interact with the Steem blockchain programmatically, whereas a witness server actually processes the constant transactions and posts that keep the blockchain alive. While a node is not a requirement for being a witness, it is a good thing to have running since it shows support for the community and also fills in the gaps when nodes sometimes go offline as occurred recently with the one I was using to gain access to data I need to maintain the witness price feed. Due to the downtime of a key node, my price feed was out of date for several days - but thanks to @yehey and some diligent work, it is now up to date again, using an alternative node.

Behind the scenes I have been arranging some exciting moves to promote Steem and Steemit with some ever larger characters both online and offline - I'm going to have fun with this and I am really looking forward to unleashing evolutionary mayhem that soothes some of the world's pain in the process. :)

I also created a new Generosity Rank algorithm for Steem to attempt to address the issue of abuse of the rewards pool and also to possibly increase the quality of posts across the whole system - I will be refining it as and when I have time, so keep an eye out for Generosity Rank 2.0 (or whatever I choose to call it once it is more evolved)!