Witness Update ~ March 25th, 2018

Current Server Setup:

• Intel Xenon E3 (4 Core/8 Threads)
• 64GB DDR3 ECC RAM
• 20TB Bandwidth

Witness Parameters:

• SBD Interest Rate: 0
• Price Feed Bias: 0
• Registration Fee: 0.2 STEEM
• Maximum Block Size: 131,072

Witness Ranking:

Full Rank: 108 / Active Rank: 89 (at the time of writing)

General Update Information

Our witness servers now consume around 31GB of RAM, and it seems that it will only go up from here. Due to the low price of STEEM I had to convert some of my Monero holding into STEEM to pay for the server bill this month. Using my savings, of course, is not sustainable in the long run since it would be foolish to sell all crypto holdings.

I am confident that the price of STEEM will rise again by the end of 2018. If I am not able to cover the cost of the server with the STEEM earned from blogging, however, I will have to make the hard choice whether to continue witnessing or not.

As for now, that is not an issue. I only wanted to point this out since many people may not know that it is expensive to run these servers. These are the servers that make sure your actions reach the chain in three seconds.

Price Feed

I am still using @yabapmatt's price feed, and since my last update, the feed was late only once due to some node latency and not the price feed itself. Again, a big thanks to my fellow Pennsylvanian, @yabapmatt for taking the time to create another price-feed option.

The Creators' Guild Update

Our group grows slow, but that is fine by me. The goal is to attract people how to want to improve their content to help make the blockchain a place of great blogs, videos, audio, etc. However, the reason our growth is slow is most likely due to the way we share posts there.

Now, to have a post shared with others in the group the Steemian has to have at least their content proofread by a proofreader in our group. Not having a link-dump keeps the rift-raft down and the posts at a high quality in the sharing channel.

I plan to start upvoting each post that goes through the proofreading stage in our group between 50 and 75% voting power. Hopefully, this will give more people the incentive to have their work proofread by our team so their work is the best it can be.

We Need Help At The Guild!

If you have any experience with reading, writing, proofreading, or anything that will help others create better content we need your help. With proofreading being at the top of the list due to timezones and people being busy.

You do not have to be a professional proofreader to help out just the desire to help others. A fresh set of eyes on a draft is a big help in catching weird sentences that the writer may not see. If you want to help and do not have a ton of confidence in proofreading, we can always work together while you get your feet wet.

Do Your Part

You may think that you vote does not matter because you are a plankton or a minnow, but I want to tell you that it does matter! Especially witness like myself who are not supported by the most prominent whales on the platform. I do have a vote from @jerrybanfield, and I am very thankful for that as it allows my server to produce about a block per day.

But that does not mean that I only want whale votes, and I believe any well-meaning witness should aim to earn 1000 votes from plankton and minnows than pander to a whale. The support Jerry made for me is his own choice, and I did no pandering. After I signed up to be a partner with him to see what it was all about, we got to chat, and he chose to cast a vote for me and for that I am grateful.

Your vote matters!

The more of us smaller fish who vote for a witness, the more stable that witness becomes. There is no need for them to worry about dropping far out of rank just because a whale vote left. If you are following a witness, know they are a good human, and love what they do for the Steem platform than you should vote for them.

Thanks For Reading!

All images came from royalty and attribution free sources unless specified.

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Looking to take your Steem based creations to the next level?
Join us over at the Creators' Guild Discord group! We are here to encourage, support and increase the creation of quality content.

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If you have any questions about the future of Steem
or my witness please feel free to message jrswab#3134 on Discord.

Click here to vote with SteemConnect!
Or go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses
You can see all active witnesses on @drakos' steemian.info

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Looking to support my content creation efforts outside of the Steem Blockchain?
Check out jrswab.com/support