@witnesssurvey has invited all top 150 witnesses to answer a couple of community questions, here are my answers:

opinion)? - @abh12345, @ammonite

I think bid bots play an important role in the ecosystem, I have made a specific post in the past regarding this subject:

"The whole phenomenon of vote buying has added a steady demand for Steem that comes from dolphins and whales who seek profit by locking away their Steem and selling their votes. In this sense, vote buying has Direct Market Impact by adding demand and shortening the supply of Steem. There is no doubt in my mind that banning or prohibiting vote bots will generate a massive sell-off in the market. But there is also other benefits of vote bots, in one hand you have the marketing aspect. Buying votes provides exposure to unseen posts, all platforms like instagram, twitter or Facebook offer similar services, where your posts can be ranked higher if you pay those companies, difference is that in Steem you are paying other token holders, is a new form of Decentralized Marketing.” - About Bots and Social Mining

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

I believe Steem is currently the most user friendly blockchain out there, having said that there is still some work to be done, that is why I am currently promoting projects that I believe make it easy for people to use the Steem blockchain without them knowing it.

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 think votes should decay, not only to inspire witnesses to do stuff that helps them attract votes constantly, but to prevent people from getting “forever” votes from people that may have left the space, lost their keys, past away, etc.

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

Yes, I think 30 or even more votes prevents concentration of top witnesses on top.

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

The dependance on Steemit Inc to maintain and run the full APIs, given the current price Witnesses can't afford to have full API nodes. Maybe setting up a Worker Proposal system, similar to Bitshares, could help fund some "community APIs".

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

I love the community, is probably the biggest in crypto and its also very loyal. There are also some great community projects out there with a lot of users.

What is the monthly cost of equipment? - @abh12345

I currently have my costs reduced at the maximum, I currently spend $240 USD on 2 nodes, which is actually more than what I receive in rewards.

Where do your earnings go? - @abh12345

All my earnings go to the servers and I have to put a bit of my own money too as my position doesn’t allow me to make profit.

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

I currently don’t have any projects of my own, instead I support with delegation and votes other great projects that I think are great for promoting Steem and attracting new users:

@provenezuela
Dpoll.xyz
@Share2Steem

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

I am not sure what this questions means really. Is it about providing a list of all my steem accounts? - If thats the case I have many but I mainly use this one and then I have a few accounts for testing purposes like @vinotinto or less serious ones like @hcf27.

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

Well if you are a backup witness, then there isn’t much of an economic incentive to be a witness at the moment. For me, is about trying to help out in the growth of the ecosystem.

How do I become a witness? - @steemingmark

You need to set up a node and register your witness, that is the easy part, the hard part is getting enough votes for it to be worthwhile.

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

As low as possible.

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

A witness is a server that confirms and broadcasts transactions, it also maintains the state of the whole blockchain and runs a seed node so that other people can sync the blockchain on their clients. But a witness, should also be a person that decides what changes get implemented on Steem and contributes to the growth of the blockchain.

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

Not really, I rely on community tools provided from other witnesses to monitor the blockchain and receive alerts.

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

You can just vote.

Should we have interest for SBD? - @patrickulrich

I don't think we should add interests to SBD at the moment. @Smooth gave a great explanation on how the system works:

"The target price is not always $1. When the total SBD supply exceeds 10% of STEEM market cap, the target price switches from pegging to USD to pegging to STEEM. In this case, the current target is about 78c, and SBD is fairly valued.
Secondarily, interest is useful when the goal is to increase both SBD price and supply by encouraging people to hold it. That is exactly the opposite of what we want now given that SBD supply is already relatively large. Witnesses not voting for interest at this time is entirely justified.
In order for the SBD target price to return to $1 either the SBD supply has to fall or the STEEM market cap/price has to rise (or both).
SBD is intended to be stable to $1 most of the time. However, it is still a Steem-based asset and all Steem-based asset holders are in the same boat (and share the pain) when it comes to the STEEM price crashing, so in this case SBD by design loses some of its value as well. We can all hope that the STEEM price increases soon and such shared pain is no longer necessary." - @smooth - https://steemit.com/witness-category/@steem-bounty/apr-anyone