Witness (re)Announcement

Witness ^(re)Announcement

After 1 year and 4 months, I'm officially back in the witness game! To understand why I have decided to come back, you should probably understand why I left in the first place.

I wrote my witness resignation post, where I described the issues I had, but mainly it was a problem with the low price of STEEM, high server costs, and PayPal banning my account. I also lost my passion for the project, Steemit Inc. was dumping hundreds of thousands of STEEM every month.

While Hive still has some of the original problems, I have much more faith in its success. My personal financial situation has also improved, so now I can afford to run a witness server again, plus recent changes to hived software made it easier to run on cheaper hardware (my server has only 32 GB RAM instead of 64 GB).

I was thinking about starting a witness again since the birth of Hive Blockchain, but I was unsure if I want to go back to the politics game (not many of you know this, since , but I suffer from social anxiety, so campaigning for votes is not my favourite thing to do). But after a recent Twitter poll, I was encouraged.

My server

I'm running Hived v1.24.2

CPU	RAM	Disks	Location	Network
AMD Opteron (8 cores)	32 GB DDR4	2x2 TB SATA	France	100Mbps

Backup ^{^}

CPU	RAM	Disks	Location	Network
Intel i7 9700k	16 GB DDR4	2x512 GB SSD (raid 0)	Slovenia	10Mbps

^{^not online 24/7, but can be added fast if the main server goes offline}

Goals & Projects

Decentralization: Supporting decentralization and stability of Hive blockchain (as every witness does).

Wrapped Hive *: We are working on a decentralized system that would replace current "custodial" one. I'm hoping to have mainnet running before December, but since we changed our original plans (one central node and validators) and replaced it with even more decentralized (only validators, each validator acts as a central node for some time), it might take longer.
Wrapped Hive Engine tokens: Since a very successful launch of wLEO, some other HE tokens are also working on getting their own wTokens. If you are interested, send me a message on discord. P.S. Code is open-source!
Different open-source tools: Such as Creator (part of it is used in HiveOnboard.com to solve scalability issue), Sharer (it's offline due to low demand), Posh Bot *.