gtg witness survey

Let’s bridge the gap between Steemians to Witnesses, they say.

I recently received a transfer from @witnesssurvey with a memo:

Thank you for supporting Steem by maintaining your witness. Steemians have created the first @witnesssurvey questionnaire that we'd like for you to participate in. Please respond to each question within a new Steem post and then leave a comment on this post for us to find your responses by 12/11/2018 so we can share your views with the community. https://steemit.com/witnesssurvey/@witnesssurvey/witnesssurveyv1-asqhhy51rj

By the way:

Witnesses were notified by a memo transfer that contained the following message:

I don’t think that’s the best way of letting users know. Many tend to ignore such messages due to the amount of spam from re-steem pseudo-services, or bit bots.
In my opinion, leaving a comment in reply to the most recent post of a witness that also tags their nickname is a better way to achieve this result.

^{Full HD video rendered exclusively for my witness updates}

Here are my answers:

What is your position/stance on bid-bots (ownership/delegations/opinion)? - @abh12345, @ammonite

I don’t own, operate, use, or delegate my SP to any bid-bot or paid voting service.
I’m not a fan, but it’s up to users to decide how they use their SP.

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? - @ericwilson

Everything is done on the UI/UX level. Users don’t need to know the inner workings of the platform’s mechanics. It’s all about how things are presented to them so they can learn as they go along.
Gamification is the key. As a witness, I’m really far away from the UI/UX level, but I endorse gamification whenever I can.
Shout-out to @arcange and @surfermarly.
I help newbies on the Steem.Chat (shout-out to #help’ful @timcliff and #general @apsu, you are awesome!)

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? - @harvhat

It some rare cases, maybe, yes, but I believe that this should happen only in the event of lost keys (or lives) and with an adequate delay (a year or two).
Features that I consider as prerequisites:
reset_account
Arhag's idea about Deadman switch / Will / Recovering accounts from lost passwords

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? - @harvhat

Thirty is the correct number.

As an SP holder, I want to have a choice and approve enough witnesses to protect the security and reliability of the network, so I believe that the number of voting slots needs to be at least 21. I’d rather increase the number of votes than decrease it. However, I can also see some valid arguments in favor of the opposite trend.

What is a concern or two that you have about the #steem blockchain? - @johnspalding

Performance at scale. Don’t get me wrong: we are fast, and we can grow a lot, but we need to think a few steps ahead in order not to be taken by surprise. It’s important especially now when we need to optimize our operational costs during bear market conditions without affecting user experience.

What are you hopeful about for the #steem blockchain? - @johnspalding

The people who use Steem. Just ask the SteemFest participants.

What is the monthly cost of equipment? - @abh12345

For beginner witnesses, it is equal to the cost of a decent, low latency storage (NVMe or SSD at least) with 48GB or 64GB of RAM. Then you add more pieces like a public seed node, a backup node or two, some helper resources, monitoring, security measures, redundancy (network uplinks, power supplies) and so on.
Infrastructure is my particular area of interest, so the infrastructure I have is not necessarily the same as what other witnesses use.

Where do your earnings go? - @abh12345

Nowhere. I’ve not powered down yet. But that’s meant to compensate for my involvement (both my time and my hardware resources)

[What are some of your] Current projects? - @abh12345

Supporting various service providers, exchanges, Steem.Chat. I wouldn’t even call them projects. It’s one big “being a witness” project. Powering up the Steem platform.

[Will you provide an] Alt accounts list? - @abh12345

@gandalf
It’s supposed to be an account for all of my non-witness activities.

What are the benefits associated with being a witness? - @klassic

Witnessing firsthand the development of an extraordinary platform.

How do I become a witness? - @steemingmark

The Steem platform’s decentralized nature means that all you need is to want hard. You set a signing key for your account and vote for yourself as a witness.
Theoretically, you are a witness, but this doesn’t mean yet that you give to the platform what witnesses are expected to give.
You need to contribute to the network with your infrastructure (at least a block producing node, but ideally more nodes, like public seed nodes, etc.)
You need to earn the trust of the community to get votes.
There are many tutorials on what witnesses are and what you need to do to become one.
I believe that everyone should read them, not only those who want to be witnesses, because they contain a lot of useful knowledge for every user of the platform.

What do you think the SBD [STEEM] price for a new account should be? - @harvhat

It’s reflected in the STEEM price. I tried to keep it relative to $3-5 before HF20. Now the registration fee is burned, so I believe that this value should be as low as possible (yet high enough to protect the namespace ). Also, please note that it’s possible to claim accounts for free when you have enough resource credits available.

What is a witness and how I become a good worker? - @rubaethsyed

You can find plenty of posts covering that subject all around Steem.

Have you implemented any new procedures for evaluating potential hardforks? - @patrickulrich

I learned from the previous HardForks, so I’m sure I can improve the process. Keyword: tests. A lot more tests.

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? - @grimgriz

Availability of votes is well known. It’s on the blockchain. Please learn more before casting your votes.

Should we have interest for SBD? - @patrickulrich

In the current economic conditions? No.

What takeaways do you have from the Hardfork 20 issues that occurred? - @patrickulrich

Such issues can happen even if we think that we’ve done enough tests. We have, however, a lot of skilled developers, witnesses, and community members to act quickly in case of emergencies, and we can handle them very well.

Do you think 20/21 top witnesses a good number or should there be more or less? - @harvhat

Yes. It’s a good balance between performance and decentralization.

Thank you for caring. The reliability and security of the Steem platform is in your hands votes.
If you have more questions, you can use the steem.chat ( #witness or #witness-social channels)

Steem On