my answers to the @witnesssurvey questionnaire

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

Honestly, I would prefer an organic trending page. However, "Don't hate the player, hate the game".

Current STEEM mechanics allows that and people will chase the best ROI. There is no %100 solution to the bid-bot economy within the current blockchain parameters. We should discuss and experiment new parameters to make the organic curation great again.

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

Making the blockchain user-friendly is a hard task. However, making the applications around the blockchain sounds better.

I have small contributions to busy.org, I watch and follow the development, give input in alternative blockchain interfaces and applications.

Regarding, helping onboarding users; I have a weekly post to give away free STEEM accounts. I also create free STEEM accounts if one of my blockchain friends needs an account to onboard their friends.

I also develop and maintain different STEEM tools which can be used to develop applications for onboarding apps/processes.

For example, https://freeaccounts.steeminator.com/ uses lightsteem which is a Python library to interact with the blockchain.

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

I am not favoring the decay. Because, it's not a real solution to the current problem, and we have already low network participation for the witness votes. This may lead to a decrease in the participation. People are lazy.

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

I am okay with the 30 witness votes. It helps backup witnesses to get a fair chance in comparison with lower numbers.

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

My biggest concern is the scalability and the affordability of the steem nodes. Storing social media data inside a blockchain don't scale well and we're already having huge amount of costs to serve a full node.

Upcoming developments will help to decrease the costs and hardware requirements, hopefully.

Also, with the recent prices, lots of backup witnesses also thinking about deactivating their witness since it's a constant negative ROI.

As a low-rank backup witness, this is also a problem for me, directly. However, I believe the blockchain and I will continue to the support the network even I get a negative ROI.

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

I love the STEEM blockchain!

It's a great blockchain to develop applications, and you can get financial support from the community. The best part is you get a user base ready to try your app, eagerly.

With the successful implementations and applications, I am sure we will see great days in the future.

What is the monthly cost of equipment? - @abh12345

40 EUR for a low-rank backup witness. But this figure may subject to change. Ex: I will have a backup node for failover if my rank increases to top50.

Where do your earnings go? - @abh12345

I power-up my earnings to increase my stake in the platform.

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

My main focus is on dpoll. It's a poll application on the top of STEEM blockchain.

However, I also maintain lots of projects related to STEEM.

• I support @sndbox and @creativecrypto with my bots.
• I support @utopian-io by reviewing the development projects.
• I maintain transmitter, which is a tool for witnesses to manage their witnesses. (enable, disable, price feed, parameter updates, etc.)
• I maintain lightsteem, which is python library to interact with the STEEM blockchain.
• I maintain steemconnect-python-client, which is a python library for developers to develop STEEM applications with Steemconnect.

I also develop and maintain lots of libraries for STEEM, I won't list all of them, since I don't want to bore people reading this. If you're still curious, you can have a look to the projects on my github profile.

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

My only active account is @emrebeyler.

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

With the current prices and being a backup witness, not much. However, supporting the network is a good motivation.

How do I become a witness? - @steemingmark

There are lots of tutorials for this subject.

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

The current price looks good to me. Onboarding new people shouldn't be an expensive operation.

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

Have a look at steem witness page on steem.center. Regarding, being a good worker, I didn't understand the question.

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

I did not. To be honest, I review all the changes in the blockchain code. However, my blockchain skills on the core level are not the top notch at the moment. That's something I want to focus and improve in the short term.

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

Sorry, I did not understand this question.

Should we have interest for SBD? - @patrickulrich

No. This decision may change in the future based on the market cap and the market movement.

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

A better test plan and a better code review. I am planning to study every inch of the next HF before it goes live.

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

I feel like 20 is good. And I don't believe there is a reason to tweak that number for now.