The Witness Files - Issue 8 with @clayop

I had the pleasure of having a chat with @clayop for today’s issue of The Witness Files. He is one of our top witnesses, and a key contributor in building up the Korean speaking community on Steemit.

If you are new to The Witness Files, it is a series of interviews I did with some of our top witnesses, to get an insight into who they are and what they do.

You can find the previous issues of the Witness Files below: Issue 1 with @complexring, Issue 2 with @riverhead, Issue 3 with @picokernel Issue 4 with @jesta, Issue 5 with @roelandp, Issue 6 with @pharesim Issue 7 with @klye

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Welcome to today’s issue of The Witness Files with @clayop

Thank you for taking the time to chat with me.

Tell me a bit about yourself. Who is @clayop?

My name is Jaewoo Cho from South Korea. I like delicious foods, especially Korean BBQ with cold noodles (yeah it’s weird to Westerners). While I don’t like spicy foods much, I sometimes enjoy the fire noodle as lunch. I also like data and statistics, that’s the reason why I am posting many kinds of stat analysis. My personal interest is in an energy system revolution, which is influenced by Jeremy Rifkin’s book Zero Marginal Cost Society, and politically I am a fan of Robert Reich who wrote Supercapitalism and argues for reduce the inequality gap. My MBTI type is ESTJ, and Enneagram is 1 with wing of 2.

When you’re not on Steemit, what do you enjoy doing?

I use most of my spare time to play with my son. We love to play catch ball, basketball, soccer, and to swim although we are not that good at swimming. Oh, a recent hobby is playing Pokemon Go with him around my community. My son was so excited because he evolved Pikachu to Raichu yesterday. The day before, we built a lego, Disney Castle after several days of work.

How did you first find out about Steemit, and when did you first become a witness?

I first joined early April 2016, about 10 days after Dan posted information about Steem on the Bitsharestalk forum. I usually quickly react to new things from Dan, but at that time I was very busy to keep up with the pace, so a 10-day gap happened. As for becoming a witness, I couldn’t remember precisely when I became a witness, maybe early May, but I clearly remember when I became a delegate(former version of witness in BitShares 1.0). It is block 1294941, 2014/12/18 9:33:20 PM UTC that I first produced a block. I have served as a top 19 witness until last month, and now I am a standby witness to backup main validators.

For non-tech-savvy people like myself, can you explain in layman’s terms what is your role as a witness, and what does a typical day look like?

Witnesses are similar to staff or employees in a company. Their main and the most important job is to keep Steem running (validating blocks). Additionally, they can do their own project based on their salary (witness rewards) for Steem community. Ideally, witnesses should compete with each other by lowering their net incomes (by spending money for projects) and they should be elected not by popularity but by contributions to the community.

The daily job of witness is monitoring the network. When someone is missing blocks, other witnesses notify to maintain the network health. However, when hardforks take place, witnesses are very nervous and turn to an emergency standby mode. Sometimes there is an undiscovered bug in a new code, then witnesses quickly react (e.g. rollback nodes, update to fixed one).

You have done a lot of work to build up the Korean community on Steemit. What are some things you are currently doing to attract and retain Korean speaking users here? And are there any things you have learnt through your involvement in building the Korean community here that you could share with other foreign language communities on Steemit?

We, Korean community, are participating in Curie to attract and retain our community. For that I donated almost all of my voting right (they allow me a couple votes per day) to Curie team. While the most powerful incentive to attract people is monetary rewards, we found that more enjoyable content and interactions between members are needed. So we started to post the “Today, Steemit is peaceful again” series where people freely comment funny images, humors, chats, and other miscellaneous stuff. Yesterday, an anonymous user created “choisoonsil” tag; the name is a sockpuppet master’s name who controls Mrs. President of Korea. I think this is very interesting because Steemit can be a channel for people who do not want to get prosecuted by the government. What I learnt from these things is that if we set a stable foundation (decent rewards in our case), the rest of the things will be done by a community itself.

Are there any other Steem-related projects you are currently involved in?

While I am not a pure developer, I developed several python scripts that can help Steemit users. Noteefi is a telegram notification bot that lets you be alerted to new posts, comments, and mentions (upvotes were removed since it’s too spammy). Steemfeed maybe the first sophisticated (it uses real trading history data from multiple exchanges) price feed script for witnesses. Last week, I provided a SBD market making bot to encourage the community to participate in SBD pegging. I am also holding the student news article competition, which rewarded 2000 SBD in total for the first participants, and the second competition probably will be held next year.

If you could change any one single thing on Steemit at this moment, what would it be and why?

It is very hard to pick a single thing because every move is important and meaningful to Steem. But I hope we have a local Steem app soon, which can protect anonymity and can encourage anti-censorship.

How do you see the Steem ecosystem evolving over the next year or two? And what new features and projects would you like to see implemented?

I like to compare Steem as a nation. We now have a territory with abundant potential, called Graphene technology. We have people, Steem users, but they are separated now. In the future DCG(Delegated Curation Guild) will build villages and gather people together. We have a great currency (Steem Dollar), which is much more stable than other cryptocurrencies, but it has a few usage now (e.g. Peerhub). So people convert Steem Dollar to Bitcoin, or consequently fiats(e.g. USD), in order to use the rewards in their real life, however, this makes Steem Dollar pegging weaker. I hope we have more active markets where Steem Dollars are circulated. To do that, we first need Steem Dollar gateways, and this is my next interest.

Thank you for your time

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Hope you enjoyed this interview with @clayop.

For more interviews with our witnesses, please follow me @nextgen622.

And to vote for a witness, you can go here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Jimmy