Witness Update and Application to MSP

Happy weekend, everyone! Sunday is here, and it's about time for us to make a witness update to keep everyone up on what's been happening with our initiatives. It's also the day we put forth our application for @minnowsupport to vote on our witness: the way that MSP votes for witnesses is changing, so we're going to roll today's update into a recap of our contributions and our request for an official witness vote from the Minnow Support Project.

First things first, let's talk our hardware, as that's the basis of a witness update. In this case, no news is good news!

 
We currently run fully up-to-date 32Gb servers for both our main and failovers, and they've been running like a charm. You can see this in our current block stats: in the six months that we've been witnessing, our total missed blocks currently sits at 5. Given how many we process on a daily basis, we're really happy with that number! Our failover has been tested once, and kicked in exactly as it was supposed to — there is only one witness in the top 30 who currently has missed one block less than us, and only one tied for 5. Considering this against length of time running and total number of blocks processed, this is a very healthy number.

Our seed node, located at seed.followbtcnews.com:2001, has been up and running smoothly for the full duration of the time we've had it. There's not really any way to jazz this information up, so again, we just keep on keepin' on.

The setup and day-to-day management of the MSP-associated full public RPC node at steemd.minnowsupportproject.org has been handled by us since inception. We take care of all coordination, maintenance and technical needs, as well as a large portion of the cost for this 256Gb public RPC node. Last week, we did need to take a few days downtime to do a full replay, but that got handled quickly and we're happy with how the entire process has gone. We've now proven that we can troubleshoot and get back online quickly and smoothly.

While our Steemit tools aren't hardware, we're getting ready to fully launch the whole suite in the upcoming weeks, as we continue to develop new ones to add to our website.

You can find our Steemit tools at http://steemistry.com

You can try out our Mentions Tool, a Steem Block Explorer, a Blocktrades Transaction Confirmation tool, and a Keyword Analyzer. If you haven't given these a shot, what are you waiting for? We're really proud of these tools; we love taking suggestions both for improvements and for new developments.

So with that, it's a good transition into our MSP specific initiatives to talk about why the Minnow Support Project account @minnowsupport should continue to vote for our witness.

@crimsonclad and I have been members of MSP since beginning of June, very shortly after inception of the server. Since we launched our witness, we have tried to contribute as much as possible to help new and old members, both on MSP and Steemit.

Here's a quick rundown of some of our contributions to MSP:

• Built and host the official MSP website located at
  http://minnowsupportproject.org . (We actually recieved an MSP Medal of Honour for this project.)

• Host the website for mspwaves.com

• Host the radio server for mspwaves.com

• We built the script for MSP that matches delegations and users to proper rewards and votes, which took a huge load off of manual work for more than ten accounts and growing

Both I and @crimsonclad personally delegate out large amounts to MSP community accounts and causes, which increases on a monthly basis. We're not big accounts yet, but we're making a difference a little at a time. We also curate out of MSP, as well as other Discord community servers.

 
Some of the community/governance/leadership related positions we hold with MSP:

• @crimsonclad is a DJ on MSPWaves Radio

• @crimsonclad is a Senior Moderator, and a member of the oversight committee

• @followbtcnews holds the position of co-chair for MSP

• @followbtcnews holds the position of MSP-Finance co-admin

We currently have over 650 total voters who believe in our witness efforts and who have taken the time to select us. That's really exciting, and the number is growing daily!

 
We're proud of the work we've done for our witness, for Steemit, and MSP. We hope that @minnowsupport continues to vote for us as we move forward. The switch to MSP community witness votes being based on applications is an exciting one which will hopefully spur more contribution to user support by witnesses seeking this vote.

I'm Jeff, and I'm @followbtcnews.
I'm a top 30 witness, along with my project partner @crimsonclad. Feel free to reach out to us on Steemit Chat or Discord any time! If we haven't earned your vote yet, please take some time to look at our tools and our work. We hope you decide to place a vote for followbtcnews at https://steemit.com/~witnesses