Announcement: Charlie Shrem Advisor to Steem and Witness Proposal

charlieshrem (71) in witness-category • 8 years ago (edited)

Hey All,

Up until now I have been very successful on Steem. By posting chapters of my book and other stories over the last several weeks, I have shown the community and myself what's possible in the new world of blockchain and creative content. Historically I have been one of the leading entrepreneurs in the cryptocurrency space, and Steem represents a new chapter for the technology and my career as a thought leader and innovator.

As an advisor to the Steem community, you can expect me to bring my insights and savvy to entrepreneurs working on Steem-based projects in order to help grow the community and create meaningful partnerships.

In addition to SteemPower.org I will be working with Ned, Dan and the Steemit team on a weekly basis in addition to many other Steem projects. If you have a project, please reach out to me and I’d love to help!

We want to support new projects that add a better user experience at the same time developer tools and documentation.

You can contact me at [email protected] or in Steem Chat.

Witness

Yesterday I launched a very powerful Witness for Steem under SteemPower.org

Throughout my career I’ve did my best to maintain neutrality and independance. Being a public speaker and in the public spotlight, I am accountable for my actions and in the past have done so.

A few days ago I hired @garethnelsonuk as a full time engineer. Gareth was the co-founder & CTO of BitInstant and is a full stack engineer. Under SteemPower.org he has build our high functioning markdown editor and our steem witness. He will be maintaining and upgrading our witness in addition to building new projects and tools.

Our Witness is based in Northern California and seed nodes are in the USA and Europe at the moment. Our plan is to have high redundancy and backup nodes which we already have running.

Our price feed is running at 0,20,30,45 minutes past the hour every hour and you check it out at https://steemd.com/@charlieshrem.

It works the following way:

1 - get the BTC/STEEM price from as many sources as possible and average it out
2 - get the USD/BTC price and average out
3 - get the BTC/SBD price
From that we to obtain the USD/SBD or USD/STEEM rate.

Some of the specifications of the Seed Nodes are:

Xeon E5-2670 quad core
16GB RAM
160GB SSD harddrive
CPU's are clocked at 2.6ghz

You can connect to our Witness at 52.52.92.99:2001 or seed.steempower.org

We would appreciate your vote the following way:

https://steemit.com/~witnesses click the arrow next to my name.
In the CLI wallet: vote_for_witness YOURACCOUNT charlieshrem true true

witness-category steem steemit

8 years ago by charlieshrem (71)

$773.91

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Trending

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jrcornel (84) · 8 years ago

It seems the doom and gloom posters saying Steemit is dead were sorely mistaken! Lots of exciting developments in the last week! Even the currency bounced ;)

$0.41

7 votes

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james212 (56) · 8 years ago

Charlie, congratulations on your advisory position. It is great to have someone with such a high reputation in the crypto community on the Steemit team.

$0.14

2 votes

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pfunk (72) · 8 years ago (edited)

Hey Charlie, it's good to know why you suddenly got so many votes.

Are these typos?

16GB SSD harddrive

You can connect to our Witness at 52.52.92.99:2001 or seed.steempower.org

16GB seems low for a drive, and you don't want anyone connecting to your witness server!

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4 votes

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garethnelsonuk (60) · 8 years ago

That's the seed node, the witness server is not public of course

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1 vote

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bitcoiner (65) · 8 years ago

Right, I was thinking the same. He probably meant Seed.

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smooth (70) · 8 years ago

Probably meant 16 GB of RAM, which is about right for now. (8 GB still works though.)

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steve-walschot (68) · 8 years ago

A few days ago I hired @garethnelsonuk as a full time engineer. Gareth was the co-founder & CTO of BitInstant and is a full stack engineer. Under SteemPower.org he has build our high functioning markdown editor and our steem witness.

You sir, are full of shit.

Steempower.org is running a free, opensource script that you mearely cloned from https://github.com/pandao/editor.md

Steempower.org is an exact copy of the examples page.

If that is why you hire a developer, i'm your man as well!

$0.07

4 votes

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garethnelsonuk (60) · 8 years ago

The editor is indeed based on editor.md - I don't believe anyone has claimed otherwise?

Charlie requested me to setup a site with that editor available, so I did so - I configured the server, installed nginx and a FastCGI process (you may ask why FastCGI is needed - it's because the editor is just the first part of the site, more is in the works - though for now you're right that it's mostly from the examples). Since you can not see the backend or the planned features you are making assumptions you should not make.

If I wanted to be pedantic and literal - out of the HTML on that page, only the DIV ID and the chunk of javascript lower down the page is an exact copy, the actual javascript code and the CSS is of course also an exact copy because the site does in fact use the editor.md component.
It also happens to run nginx on top of Debian GNU/Linux - but if it was REALLY needed I suppose I could knock up a custom httpd-only OS kernel (seriously - osdev is a hobby of mine and an httpd in a kernel would be fairly simple).

Would you like a custom steempower OS? I can't promise it'll be as efficient as the Linux kernel with nginx on top, but at least it wouldn't just be using a free, opensource kernel that I merely cloned from. It'll take me a week or two though, and since it is a lot of effort i'd want paid for it, but I can do that if you'd like?
See https://github.com/GarethNelson/Zoidberg for an example of my work in osdev - put on hold right now due to focusing on steem projects, but if you want to replace what Charlie is paying for a couple of weeks i'd be happy to write a webserver OS for you, and then i'll write a new markdown editor so it's all completely original, because how dare anyone use code that was already written when providing a useful service.

Apart from setting up the webserver (and taking care to ensure it'll both be scalable in future and remains secure) I also setup the witness infrastructure and took care of securing that too.

I'm proud to say that BitInstant was never broken into even once despite multiple attempts - the single security issue we had was in fact an issue with our domain registrar that I had no control over. I'm bringing that same attention to detail over here on steem and me and Charlie have some big things planned.

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steve-walschot (68) · 8 years ago

Skip all the post filling, tech looking talk. It's just like air. Feel free to fill up 4 pages of text with things you might be doing, i don't care unless it's up and running. So you setup a VPS. Good. Setting up a full running witness node takes like 15 minutes at most on a blank server.

The editor is indeed based on editor.md - I don't believe anyone has claimed otherwise?

Yes, Charlie did.

Under SteemPower.org he has build our high functioning markdown editor and our steem witness.

Anyway, don't feel like starting a flamewar. Charlie's name is dirty. Always been, always will be. Proven and sentenced. This is yet another proof. I rest my case.

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garethnelsonuk (60) · 8 years ago

Most of that comment of mine was slightly sarcastic - the main point is you're calling Charlie a liar and criticising my own work for the high crime of reusing existing code - something anyone sensible does.

There's something called "Not Invented Here syndrome" - it's generally seen as a bad thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

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chitty (69) · 8 years ago

Welcome @charlieshrem, I think its great to have big bitcoin personalities like yourself on board so you have my full support.

Please tell @garethnelsonuk to tune the price feed according to dan´s post regarding sbd stability

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3 votes

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garethnelsonuk (60) · 8 years ago

hey there, that's actually next on my rather large TODO list

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3 votes

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charlieshrem (71) · 8 years ago

Working on it!

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1 vote

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phenom (61) · 8 years ago (edited)

Regarding your markdown editor - it's good, thanks for the development.
But it lacks really convenient feature - uploading images and gifs through drag and drop. It'd be a time saver if you implement such functionality. To give you example, check how it works here

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4 votes

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billbutler (65) · 8 years ago

Voted! Thanks for evangelizing Steemit. It's appreciated.

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2 votes

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berniesanders (77) · 8 years ago

Flagging because I disagree with the way Charlie was voted in as a witness before his server was even up and running. Also, this isn't worthy of almost $600 even though the Steemit boys disagree.

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9 votes

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quinneaker (74) · 8 years ago

You continue to appear the most objective and honorable with your actions.
Thank you

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3 votes

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williambanks (69) · 8 years ago

Charlie not that I'm complaining here. But isn't there some sort of run up process involved in becoming a witness? I noticed that @nextgencrypto was not on the list at all and I'd like to vote for him as well as you, but I don't know how to find ones not on the list. Nevertheless there are people that have been trying for months and some how you got it right out the gate.

Is there a trick to this of some sort?

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1 vote

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williambanks (69) · 8 years ago

Guy's apologies. When I posted this it looked like there were no comments at all. Internet is shitty here.

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1 vote

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mpa (41) · 8 years ago

https://steemd.com/witnesses

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1 vote

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fefrontline (25) · 7 years ago

wow thats crazy..... i was told come over to Streemit , cause YT is power triping

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1 vote

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alchemage (66) · 8 years ago

Would someone please explain to me what a witness exactly is? Or perhaps link me to an article with an in-depth explanation?

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1 vote

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pfunk (72) · 8 years ago

I wrote a guide to answer this question :) https://steemit.com/steemit-guides/@pfunk/a-full-steemit-user-s-guide-to-steem-witnesses

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5 votes

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alexgr (66) · 8 years ago

https://steemit.com/steemit/@shenanigator/official-steemit-faq-rough-draft-your-edits-are-needed

Scroll down (or ctrl+f witness)...

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1 vote

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alchemage (66) · 8 years ago

Wonderful, thank you kindly.

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jlufer (75) · 8 years ago

excellent his post, valuable content in it thank you very much

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peacekeeper (58) · 8 years ago

Thanks for all you are doing for the Steemit Community. I have watched several of your interviews.

Can you figure out how to add a counter to the markdown? Or a little HTML script that will work on the platform. This would be huge to see how many users actually view our posts. It could be a third party post view counter or something off the blockchain where you could see the stats. But this would be awesome to see the views. A lot of users have been talking about this feature. Thanks in advance for anything you can do to help us out.