Steem Witness 14,542 Reporting For Duty!

Would you please vote for me at steemit.com/~witnesses because of the story I share with you in this post explaining why we need witnesses, the challenges in getting new witnesses, and my journey in becoming a witness?

When I first joined Steemit and saw the word "witness" and authors asking to "vote for me as a witness" I did a quick look into it and concluded it was too technical for me along with mining and anything else requiring a bit of coding. I quickly dismissed the entire witness program because I assumed I could not participate or it would be over my head. For most of my first month on Steemit, I ignored any request to "vote for me as a witness" because I thought someone better qualified should be doing that.

About four weeks ago, @roelandp announced SteemFest² which I initially got excited about but then realized that me making a trip to Portugal at that time would probably not work. More about that in another post. The SteemFest² post got me curious to learn about @roelandp including looking all the way back through his posts and reading his post about becoming a witnesst at https://steemit.com/witness-category/@roelandp/witness-roelandp. I was surprised to find in his post that being a witness did not purely require technical experience but was also a position of service in our community. In the reasons to vote for him, @roelandp listed activities such as organizing SteemFest, promoting Steem, and even "adding a little humor" as reasons he would make a good witness. With this new way of looking at witnesses, I realized it was time for me to rethink whether I could actually be a witness!

Inspired to try to learn Ubuntu Linux and the commands I would need to use to become a witness, I began Googling and Googling and Googling about becoming a witness. One of my recent posts is entirely devoted to collecting the best of what I found at https://steemit.com/witness-category/@jerrybanfield/launch-a-steem-witness-today. Now empowered with knowing exactly what I did not know, I started realizing that I was just a few hours away from having the technical knowledge I needed to become a witness.

Reading all the guides I linked to in previous posts gave me courage to commit to becoming a witness and motivated me to share my enthusiasm before actually becoming a witness because that would be the best place to reach other potential witnesses from. At the end of June, I launched a course on the University of Jerry Banfield named #1 Cryptocurrency Mining Opportunity which basically pitched becoming a witness during about an hour of videos explaining why becoming a witness was awesome, how much witnesses earned, and links to all of my research about where to get started. The primary audience was people watching my videos on YouTube and Facebook that were interested in mining but were not aware of the opportunity to become a witness.

One student became a witness and posted the information I shared in the course on Steemit. This post motivated another witness to get online and share his guide criticizing me for having made and sold a course about becoming a witness because the information was already freely available on Google. I understand and accept the criticism because I borrowed over $50,000 and spent six years with hardly any income to get a bachelor's degree and a master's degree which gave me all information about criminal justice which was freely available online and at the library.

Fortunately this video course solidified my commitment to become a witness which was scary because I was not sure I could actually learn Ubuntu Linux good enough to get my servers secured and operational. Amazingly the students taking my course motivated me the most to get to work because several of them were online within 24 hours of enrolling. Meanwhile, it took me a month of research, server rentals, hype, errors, and a lot of great help especially from @someguy123 to finally get my servers online! Here are my specs.

Witness

Dedicated server
64GB DDR4 RAM
2x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V3
2x 240GB SSDs
1Gbit/s

Seed

Dedicated server at seed.jerrybanfield.com
64GB DDR4 RAM
2x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V3
2x 240GB SSDs
1Gbit/s

In choosing these servers, I asked @someguy123 what I would need to be a top 20 witness because I believe a backup witness should be prepared to step in during an emergency at a moment's notice and handle a top 20 workload until the top 20 are back online.

The two most helpful guides for me setting up my witness were

1. Your guide to setting up a Witness Server (STEEM-in-a-box HF19) by @someguy123 at https://steemit.com/steem/@someguy123/your-guide-to-setting-up-a-witness-server-steem-in-a-box-hf19
2. Complete Witness Installation Guide by @krnel at https://steemit.com/witness-category/@krnel/complete-witness-installation-guide.

The rest of the links I used are in my post at https://steemit.com/witness-category/@jerrybanfield/launch-a-steem-witness-today. I will do another post like this soon with the exact commands I used which I hope will make it easier if you are a total beginner to Linux like me!

Would you please vote for me now as a witness by typing my name in at https://steemit.com/~witnesses as jerrybanfield because then I will have the chance to be an effective backup witness for us!

Here are a few reasons not to vote for me!

1. My posts are too long and you already stopped reading 5 minutes ago.
2. I have less than a week of experience maintaining a Linux server.
3. After the pump and dump I did with Dash, am I really planning to stay here on Steemit indefinitely?
4. With all of the time I spend being an author on Steemit, do I really have time to make a good witness too?

What are a few reasons to vote for me?

1. Steemit is what I do full time now. Steemit is the #1 activity on my to do list, the #1 community I participate in, and my top priority. After my health and family, Steemit is my number three priority in life.
2. Willing to ask for help with any issues I have maintaining my servers and continuing to learn about Ubuntu Linux because I want to make tutorials here and an online video course for beginners.
3. Planning a new witness guide soon for absolute Linux beginners with literally every single command needed to start from zero.
4. This is the community and opportunity I have been looking for during the 5 years of my business online and I plan on staying here indefinitely!
5. I am prepared to act as a top 20 witness at a moments notice and my friend @jo3potato has agreed to help me monitor my servers because he has more experience with Linux than I do and one of us is almost always awake 24/7 because we are in different time zones and on different sleeping schedules.
6. In becoming a witness, I hope to encourage more readers to become witnesses because we need as many good witnesses as we can get! The attrition rate over time in the top 30+ is high! With over 14,000 witnesses having went online at some point, there are about one hundred that are online today with probably only 30 to 50 having the ability to handle the top 20 workload. As we grow, we need more depth to stand up to unexpected problems and attacks from hackers who currently would only need to take a small number of servers offline at once to bring the Steem blockchain to a halt. 40 seed nodes and about the same number of witnesses in fact. More witnesses = more resilience.
7. You spent this long reading this post that it would only be logical to make it worth it by voting now because you might feel good every time knowing you voted when you see me asking for votes in the rest of my posts!

THANK YOU VERY MUCH for reading all the way to the end!

Would you please vote for me now as a witness at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because this will help me get my first block and start participating?

Love,
Jerry Banfield