@Yabapmatt's Witness Update & Minnow Support Project Application

It’s been about three weeks now since I first set up my witness server and first and foremost I want to extend a big, heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who has supported me thus far!

From a technical perspective, my witness server has been running great. I know that’s not much of an accomplishment when you’re only producing a few blocks a day, however I am confident that it will be ready to go when and if a larger block load should be bestowed upon me.

Contributions

Over the past three weeks I have also made the following contributions which I hope will help grow and improve Steem and its various sites and services:

1. Three major updates to the Steem Bot Tracker site to better help all Steemians promote their content:
   • Steem Bot Tracker Update 4 - Round Details View
   • Standardized Configuration for Bid-Based Voting Bots
   • Steem Bot Tracker Update 5 - Pre-Vote Group Info & Bid Validation
     
   
   
2. Created a Curation Reward Estimation tool which allows users to get an estimate for what their curation rewards might be under different scenarios. I think curation rewards are undervalued due to the math being too complicated to easily estimate in one’s head.
   
   This is very detrimental to Steem in my opinion so my hope is that the tool will help to increase the amount of curation that occurs - it has really opened my eyes to the value of curation at least!
   
   
3. Contributed to Steem.NET and Steem JS SDKs to help developers build more great things on the Steem platform:
   1. Fix for Steem.NET to work with new RPC nodes
   2. Added stream functions to Steem JS documentation

The Minnow Support Project

Most importantly though, I had the opportunity to listen to and participate in the Steem Growth Forum on the MSP Waves radio show hosted by @aggroed this past Saturday. If you are interested in listening to our discussion you can find it here: Steem Growth Forum part II 

I come on the show at about 47 minutes into the video, although I would encourage everyone to listen to the entire thing if you have time since there were a lot of great guests on the show and many great discussions.

I’d often heard of the Minnow Support Project but I never really knew much about it. Now that I’ve learned about who they are and their efforts to help new users and grow the platform I’ve offered my support in the form of an SP delegation and hope to contribute in other ways in the future as well.

Also, as the title of this post mentions, I would like to apply for their support through their newly announced witness voting initiative described here: Minnow Support Project Updated Witness Voting 

As such I will do my best to answer the following three questions:

What are you pledging to do to support the Steemit Community?

As an investor I want to do whatever I can to support the SteemIt community because, well, I want my investment to grow! Most cryptocurrency investments are passive - I have no say or control in what happens with Bitcoin, for example - but with Steem I’m excited to have the opportunity to play an active role in shaping the platform and the community to realize its full potential.

Specifically I am trying to focus on bringing more money into Steem. It goes without saying that if the price of STEEM rises, everyone benefits, and the price will only rise if people are buying it. Lots of people talk about $10 STEEM or even $100 STEEM, but it will take a LOT of money coming in to make that happen and I don’t see much progress on that front so far.

There’s a lot more to this than I can discuss here (this post is already getting rather long!) but in short I’m pledging to work on and support projects that can bring serious money into the Steem platform to benefit both myself and the SteemIt community as a whole.

What are you pledging to do to support the Minnow Community?

In my opinion one of the biggest obstacles for minnows and new users is the overwhelming amount of things you need to learn about Steem and SteemIt to make the most out of the platform. I’m an engineer and as such I’m generally pretty good at learning how things work, but even for me it was pretty overwhelming at first.

So my pledge to support the minnow community is to continue to work to make posts, tools, and services that make SteemIt easier to understand and to use. So far to that end I’ve created the bot tracker site and curation reward estimator (mentioned above) and also published a mini-series entitled “How to Steem”. You can see the posts at the links below, if you’re interested:

1. How To Steem - Part 1 - Learn, Learn, Learn!
2. How to Steem - Part 2 - Create Value!
3. How to Steem - Part 3 - Promote Your Posts!

What are you pledging to do to support the Minnow Support Project?

Initially I have offered my support via SP delegation, and I pledge to increase that delegation as my SP grows, both through rewards earned on SteemIt, as a witness, and through additional direct investment.

In addition to that I also pledge to donate some of my time and development skills to improving the MSPs various bots and services if and when that is needed.

As I mentioned above, I have only just recently begun to learn about the MSP, so I plan to dig deeper and get a really good understanding of everything that the MSP is doing and offer my thoughts and ideas on how to best achieve the goals of supporting minnows as well as peace, abundance, and liberty!

A Final Thought

Lastly, you may notice that I have declined the payout on this post. I thought long and hard about this and ultimately came to the conclusion that this post doesn’t add value to the community in and of itself. As such I feel that it should not take rewards from the fund that could instead go to other great content that is adding value.

This post is about promoting the value that I think I can provide to the community as a witness, so I feel that the rewards from this post should be in the form of witness votes rather than content votes. Going forward I plan to decline payouts on any posts that I make which are meant to promote my work and my witness and don’t directly provide value to the community.

So if you would like to support my contributions and/or my ideas and vision for the future of the Steem platform, I would greatly appreciate your witness vote. To cast your vote you can:

• Go here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
• Scroll to the bottom
• Write yabapmatt and vote or set yabapmatt as a proxy
• Use Steem Connect to vote for me as a witness
• Or Use Steem Connect for proxying your witness votes to me

Thank you again to everyone who has supported me, and for those of you who are in the US have a happy and healthy Thanksgiving!