The Witness Files - Issue 6 with @pharesim

Welcome to Issue 6 of the Witness Files with @pharesim.

In this series, I will be interviewing some of our top witnesses, to get an insight into who they are and what they do.

@pharesim was kind enough to join me for today’s interview. He is involved with the Pevo project,, as well as actively involved in many other Steem-related projects.

You can find the previous issues of the Witness Files below: Issue 1 with @complexring Issue 2 with @riverhead Issue 3 with @picokernel Issue 4 with @jesta Issue 5 with @roelandp

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Thank you for taking the time to chat with me. No problem, I’m always happy to answer questions.

Tell me a bit about yourself. Who is @pharesim? A 33 year old german software architect, system administrator and dog lover.

Here’s a photo of my dog Juka

When you’re not on Steemit, what do you enjoy doing? I’ve always been a big PC nerd, wrote my first script (automated character creation for a pen and paper rpg) at the age of 10. So this is not just a job, but my life. To relax I like playing games (mostly old franchises…Doom, Fallout, Battlefield, XCom) and going for long walks with my dog. Gardening is nice too, but right now I don’t have a place to do that.

How did you first find out about Steemit, and when did you first become a witness? @officialfuzzy introduced me to the project one or two weeks after mining started, and asked me to help him mining. I agreed for a share of the rewards and started reading the whitepaper. I was hooked immideately. For more than three years I was involved in crypto projects where we tried to reward those contributing to the ecosystem, not just miners and speculators. None of those projects took off, but I knew Steem would have the potential to reach the masses. So I set myself up as a witness right from the beginning, and started contributing in every way I could imagine.

For non-tech-savvy people like myself, can you explain in layman’s terms what is your role as a witness, and what does a typical day look like? The most important task for witnesses is adding blocks to the blockchain, writing the ledger. Other coins use miners for this job, but there are several issues with that approach. Bitcoin for example is dominated by a few big mining pools, which endangers decentralization. Mining wastes a lot of energy, and miners aren’t really interested in the well being of the project because they usually sell as soon as they can get a good price. As we are rewarded in SteemPower, there’s a great incentive for us to contribute in more ways than just running the node. Most of the witnesses have started projects that will help to reach new users for Steem and improve their experience. For me there is no typical day right now. I’m preparing to travel Europe as an ambassador for Steem, and there’s still quite some things to organize here before that. My time on Steem is split between coding, supporting users, consulting projects, marketing and sometimes chatting.

You are involved in the Pevo project. Can you tell us what it is, and where things are currently at with that project? PEvO (Publish and Evaluate Online) wants to create the first serious option to publish and continuously review scientific papers online. This wasn’t possible before because everything on a centralized server can be changed or disappear completely. When a paper is published on the blockchain it is immutable, and thus citeable. The publishing industry is absolutely dominated by big journals these days, and they charge a lot of money for the work of others just because they inherited this position. Like big newspapers they are not really needed any more though. We just have to convince the scientific community to let go of their beloved tradidions ;-)

Are there any other Steem-related projects you are currently involved in? I set up SteemDice, and work on getting a slick JS library for a GUI for this and other projects. I’m also actively supporting curie, the german and other foreign communities and steemit.academy. There’s some other projects where I’m involved with some sorts of consulting, but nothing I’d be able to talk about yet.

If you could change any one single thing on Steemit at this moment, what would it be and why? The search functionality. Looking for old posts can be extremely time consuming when you don’t remember the user who posted it.

How do you see the Steem ecosystem evolving over the next year or two? And what new features and projects would you like to see implemented? I’m looking forward to see video hosting and of course all the announced improvements to steemit.com My predictions about the future of coins have never been accurate, so I won’t answer that one. I’m still here and earning SP, and I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t believe in its success ;)

Thank you for taking the time to chat with me. No problem, I’m always happy to answer questions.

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Hope you enjoyed this interview with @pharesim.

For more interviews with our witnesses, please follow me @nextgen622.

And to vote for a witness, you can go here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Jimmy