@witnesssurvey just invited me to answer questions about my thoughts on witnessing - so here they are!
What is your position/stance on bid-bots (ownership/delegations/opinion)?
I have been vocal on this and made several posts about it - including this one comparing drug addiction to bid bot use. In short, I don't like bidbots and I think they fundamentally break 'proof of brain' and thus therefore fundamentally break the entire premise of Steem. I have made suggestions to limit their effect on Steem without banning them totally as I respect anarchic principles of non overpowering of others. One approach was to run an official steemit bidbot, but a better one is to add in voter muting into steem websites.
Bots are actually banned by Steemit.com's ToS document, but no-one seems to pay any attention - so we need to take matters into our own hands so that the market can truly decide.
What does the witness want to do to make the blockchain more user-friendly and help to on-board new users. What do THEY personally want to see done and what will they do to get it there?
I have developed a full spectrum onboarding program and a team to help out, which is currently in the planning stage, buy you will be able to get more info from @steempassport soon.
I have outlined my vision on some of this in a full project overview document here - you need to sign in to hackmd to read it.
We need ways to onboard users quickly and without cost to them - but in a way that prevents abuse and spam. We also need to provide education and support to new users. @steempassport addresses all of these - see the document for more details or join the discord group.
Do you think votes for witnesses should last indefinitely or should they time out (or perhaps decay over time) so that periodically voters will need to reevaluate and affirm their positions by recasting their votes?
I promoted the idea of witness decay a long time ago and even got a hat tip from @ned on it. Since then we haven't seen any movement on it's implementation.
I put together an algorithm that shows in realtime the effects that vote decay would have on witness positions if it were implemented (and if no subsequent revoting occurred). It showed that we would see significant shifts since many of the top witnesses are there due to long held votes.
I also put together a version of the witness table if @freedom's vote were not involved - just for reference.
Do you think the 30 witness votes each steemian gets is the correct number, especially in light of the fact there are only 20 top witnesses to be seated?
I have stated recently that 30 is too many as it allows domination. A super majority of witnesses is 17 - so no-one should have enough votes to produce that majority on their own. A figure of 10 might be a better one than 30.
What is a concern or two that you have about the #steem blockchain?
There is a massive lack of co-ordination among the creative and technical members of the Steem world. As a result it is common for people to not understand where the project is headed or what they themselves most need to do to have personal success and to grow the project in general. We need real community interaction from those who develop the blockchain (it is usual for them to NEVER reply to comments in github, on steem or in chat.. So we have ZERO communication! It's pretty terrible for an allegedly 'social' project).
Competing projects will eventually overtake Steem if the basics of human interaction aren't better handled here. A social project must have a social component running right through it and in it's DNA - it isn't enough to be so heavily focused into technical solutions that the rest of the project gets left behind.
More valuation of free speech, more valuation of co-creativity and less focus on short term gain. Steem has the potential to replace Facebook - but not if we are scrambling to just get as much as we can from it in the next 3 months.
What are you hopeful about for the #steem blockchain?
The uncensored and mostly uncontrolled nature of it means that we can truly tap in to the soul of humanity - the creative spark that moves the world. This rarely happens online due to deliberate corporate interference that fears such things. I have seen sites get bought out and shut down before who channeled humanity in this way - I think Steem's design means we can finally resist this and make real, beneficial changes for humanity.
What is the monthly cost of equipment?
I don't have the figures in front of me, but I have been running servers for a long time and know how to get good deals that are WAY cheaper than what most are paying. I run a main server and a backup and it probably comes to under $150 per month. At the moment, with steem being low, I am probably running at a loss.
Where do your earnings go?
To pay for hardware and my time in keeping up with everything witness related, in making proposals for solutions and generally helping to improve Steem. I am a professional software engineer, so I run at a loss doing this as software engineering rates are quite high.
[What are some of your] Current projects?
I am involved in MANY projects.. LOL. The best known ones on Steem are my stats site at Steem Ocean and the onboarding program @steempassport. I also run a social network that is focused on healing, balancing and evolving - which may become an SMT next year. I work behind the scenes with @oracle-d too.
[Will you provide an] Alt accounts list?
I have been collecting a few account names since RCs were introduced but I am not using most of them. The only ones I use actively are @ura-soul, @steempassport and @steem-ocean.
What are the benefits associated with being a witness?
Good question! At my position in the witness list, I'm not sure there are many benefits - it's a lot of learning, monitoring and thinking - with not much reward. The aim is to be in the top 20 and then the benefits are to be able to help direct the future of Steem and also get paid well for doing so.
I do get to chat with other witnesses who are generally good people with good minds.
How do I become a witness?
Go and read the many guides that already exist - it's a long subject that isn't really appropriate to be answered in this questionnaire.
What do you think the SBD [STEEM] price for a new account should be?
This is something that has to take in a variety of factors and I'm not sure I have ever seen all of the relevant data laid out in an approachable way. The price of new accounts has to factor in levels of Spam on the network, bandwidth usage, the price of Steem/SBDs and basic supply/demand. Personally, I want the price to be as low as possible and @Steempassport has novel ways of getting accounts paid for on behalf of new users, so the cost will be nothing to them (but their behavior will be monitored to prevent spam/abuse) - follow @Steempassport for more info.
What is a witness and how I become a good worker?
A witness is a computer server that is running the Steem platform software in 'witness' mode. Witness servers build the blocks that are added to the steem blockchain every 3 seconds and they reach consensus to ensure that the data has not been tampered with. Basically they are a distributed database server network that runs the Steem eco-system. The human involved is tasked with running the hardware and also making certain decisions about values that affect the Steem blockchain overall.
How do you become a good worker? lol.. I think maybe such a self-help programme is beyond the scope here. :) - Always be honest - that's a good start.
Have you implemented any new procedures for evaluating potential hardforks?
I stated that I intend to test future hard forks and a few witnesses started a Github community to do that. It is tough for me to do this though as it takes a lot of time and I am already involved in many projects. My C++ skills are a bit rusty - but at some point I will get more involved on this level. You can read this post where I highlight some of what I see being needed. I suggested running a project management app to improve visibility of the testing efforts but I didn't get much of a response from most witnesses. Some were behind it though. I'm not sure if this is apathy or just that many of them don't really know how to code or test.
How does a new user make the availability of his vote known to the cabal of witnesses wannabes trying to overthrow the current witness regime?
lol.. erm.. just vote? I'm not sure I understand the question. The issue is more the other way around - how does a witness gain the attention of voters. Any voter can go to the witness rank table and click on the chain link icons to view each witness's profile and opening thread. Just find the ones you support and vote for them!
Should we have interest for SBD?
SBDs are meant to be indexed to the US Dollar, so if the US Dollar goes up with inflation, so does SBD. I don't see any need to add interest on to SBDs myself.
What takeaways do you have from the Hardfork 20 issues that occurred?
I wrote this post at the time specifying changes that we need. We need greater co-operation and more testing, with less willingness to blindly adopt new changes.
One of the main issues is that most of the top 20 witnesses don't ever talk to the others publicly (some don't even appear to be using Steem at all!). We need better communication as a minimum.
Do you think 20/21 top witnesses a good number or should there be more or less?
I made this post showing that I think we should change the curve of rewards for witnesses to be more balanced. I'm not sure if we need more in the top group.. I think maybe 20 is enough, we just need to change the other parameters I already highlighted in this post.
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
Vote @ura-soul for Steem Witness!
(Witnesses are the computer servers that run the Steem Blockchain.
Without witnesses there is no Steem, Steemit, DTube, Utopian or
Busy... You can really help Steem by making your 30 witness votes count!)
