5 months ago, on May 29th 2017, I made my witness annoucement. I didn't build any secret witness voting alliances or campaign in direct message chats beyond posting here and letting a couple friends know.

Today, I broke into the top 20!

Thank you so much for all your support. Keep in mind, witness votes change all the time, so there's no telling where I'll be in the future.

Here's a quick video I made this morning to share my excitment with you via my voice and body language. So much is lost in text alone.

What I've Been Up To

• As I started creeping closer to the top 20, I realized I need to have a hot backup witness server running all the time. Every 63 seconds, I'm up to add more content to the blockchain so if my primary box has an issue, I need to fail over quickly to the secondary machine. Last night (how's that for timing!), I finished configuring and syncing my backup witness server. It's now live with these specs:

    32 GB RAM
    4 cores
    1 TB HDD
    1gbit/s network

I figured it was important to get a new server in a completely different location. I now have a live witness server in both Germany and the United States. Once again, big thanks to @privex. If you end up using their services, please let them know I sent you.

• I've been involved in some public discussions with Steemit, inc about the frustration the community has been feeling lately with the site performance of Steemit.com. You can read about my posts here and here and some recent dialogue here and here. My goal with these discussions is not to troll, belittle, or in any way discourage those who are making this platform we love so much. My intention is to passionately and accurate represent this community as best I can. Actively using steemit is really frustrating right now. I've been using steemitstage.com lately, which helps a bit, along with busy.org and chainbb.com. I hope we'll continue to see open communication from Steemit, Inc about these issues and what's being done to resolve them.

• My witness missed 8 blocks! 😱😦🤦 Though I have a great notification script, it was sadly disabled! The last time I got a notification in September, I forgot to remove the notification text file to re-enable it. The reason my witness went down is I ran out of space in the shared memory file. In the future, I'll be writing a script to monitor that file and send notifications (along with disk free space and other important server metrics). My Rocketchat notifications on my phone, for some reason, didn't notify me right away either. This was the main reason I finally got around to setting up a live backup server.

• My seed node at steem-seed.lukestokes.info:2001 is still working like a champ.

• Current Economic Witness Settings:

  SBD APR	Bias	Reg fee
  1%	0	0.2

• I moved the Witness Engagement Report from weekly to monthly as it doesn't change all that much each week. We're at 23.44% engagement for accounts with > 100,000 VESTS.

• I'll see you in Lisbon next week! I'm going to do my best to represent the community, have fun, and get a feel for what the future of STEEM, SMT, and Steemit will be. I'll let you know how it goes for sure.

Thanks again for your support!

Got 33 transactions on block 16674820 by lukestokes.mhth -- latency: 82 ms

I love seeing that in my logs. :) :)

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As of this post, I'm currently holding position 20!

If you want to know more about what witnesses do check out:

• Steemit is Free, But Your Witness Vote Determines its Future

You can read my witness announcement post here:

• Vote Luke Stokes for Witness as lukestokes.mhth!

My previous witness updates:

• Witness Update - lukestokes.mhth - September 2nd, 2017
• Witness Update - lukestokes.mhth - July 19th, 2017
• Witness Update - lukestokes.mhth - July 14th, 2017
• Witness Update - lukestokes.mhth - June 19th, 2017
• Witness Update - 6/6/2017 - More Human Than Human

I don't plan to do frequent witness updates unless I have something worth sharing, but I'm always available if you have a question or concern. I'm monitoring my servers daily and keeping up with the #witness channel on Steemit.chat as best I can.

_{Created with ChainBB to support that project.}

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Luke Stokes is a father, husband, business owner, programmer, and voluntaryist who wants to help create a world we all want to live in. Visit UnderstandingBlockchainFreedom.com

_{I'm a Witness! Please vote for @lukestokes.mhth}