Someguy123 Witness Update

Apologies for the irregularity. Some projects take a while, and I often release them in bursts. Thus, rather than doing these weekly, I do them every 2-3 weeks.

At the current point of time, I am jumping between rank 36 to 37 on the rankings. It's now at a point where I have a backup witness node, which I used to accomplish the 0.14.2 update without missing blocks.

So what have I done since the last update?

My last update was at the very end of August, you can read it here.

Here's what I've done since then:

• Raised 150 USD (216 SBD) for RiseUP
• Created the first TOR RPC node for STEEM
• Built Steemvalue which offers instant conversion rates. Similar to Bitcoin's PREEV
• Released Understeem which is an alternative Steemit, accessible over TOR, with zero censorship
• Wrote an article explaining witnesses
• Created an alternative witness pricefeed script in JS
• Documented the account recovery process, explaining why trustee's can't steal your account
• Pegged my price feed by -10% as per @dan's guidelines
• And of course, today, I have released Git-Steem, which is a somewhat decentralized Github.

What am I working on now?

I have many projects in the works. Some are related to helping witnesses improve their reliability, others are tools to further the STEEM ecosystem.

Most importantly, I spend many hours just helping people out on Steemit.CHAT - you'll see me almost every day in #dev and #witness

Some of my work is collaboration with other users, for example I've provided some infrastructure to @williambanks' Havin Project

Thoughts from this month

This month has been a rollercoaster. We've had many people leave the STEEM community, and many others join the community.

We've had many new projects pop up, and I've had AnonSteem maintain popularity, unlike many projects I build which lose users after a week.

The recent events of @charlieshrem flying into the top 19 witnesses in the space of 24 hours has been very concerning to many witnesses, and has re-inforced the idea that the witness list is strongly controlled by Steemit Inc.

While I don't have any problems with Charlie Shrem himself, I do have a problem that a single person can be thrown into the top 19 overnight, while some witnesses have been working for months and struggle to go above rank 20-30. ( two examples being @gtg and @steve-walschot )

Conclusion

I hope to see more great projects built on top of STEEM.

Right now, we're very centralized, with many people using just Steemit, rather than other unique platforms such as @picokernel's Squeek - I want to see that change.

We don't all have to use Steemit; STEEM is a powerful blockchain, with many capabilities, and I believe we need to embrace that, with more alternative platforms.

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Do you like what I'm doing for STEEM/Steemit?

Vote for me to be a witness - every vote counts.

Don't forget to follow me for more like this.

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