It's been about a month ago since I started running a hive witness and it's time for a short update. Since the first hick-ups were solved (causing a missed block) the witness and the server are running smoothly without the need for much maintenance.
In the past month the number of votes also showed some upward movement. At the moment the witness is listed at rank 100 when not considering inactive witnesses. This current ranking yields the witness about two to three blocks to be signed.
As you might know from previous posts, the witness is running on a rented server. This comes with costs of about 43 USD. Although not the goal, it would be great if the rental fees can be fully covered by the witness rewards. To see the status of this goal I hacked together a little script to get the number of blocks produced and the corresponding revenue and (currently still) loss details. Here's the code snippet for your own use:
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from beem import Hive
from beem.account import Account
from beem.amount import Amount
from beem.market import Market
user = "michelmake"
server_cost = 43.0
time_window = 60 # in days from now
vests = 0
blocks_produced = 0
for h in Account(user).history_reverse(stop=datetime.utcnow() - timedelta(days=time_window )):
if h['type'] == "producer_reward":
precision = int(h['vesting_shares']['precision'])
full = int(h['vesting_shares']['amount'])
vests += full / 10**precision
blocks_produced += 1
rewards_HP = Hive().vests_to_hp(Amount(vests,"VESTS"))
hive_price_USD = Market().hive_usd_implied()
rewards_USD = rewards_HP * hive_price_USD
average_block_rewards_USD = rewards_USD / blocks_produced
print("Total blocks produced %d" % blocks_produced )
print("Total producer rewards %.3f HP" % (rewards_HP))
print("Total producer rewards $%.3f" % (rewards_USD))
print("Net running cost $%.3f" % (server_cost-rewards_USD))
print("Blocks needed to break even: %d" % (server_cost/average_block_rewards_USD))
Disclaimer As you can see, I'm no developer :D
Running this script on the witness yields the data below. So far 62 blocks with a total revenue of ~83 HP which yields a net running cost of ~$15. Not bad I'd say. These costs are based on the hive price at the time of writing this post. A quick calculation using the current usd value of Hive shows that a minimum of about 90 blocks per month are needed. So about three per 24hr:
As I've mentioned in the past, the server cost is completely covered by HBD savings revenue. Effectively this fully Hive-funded witness runs by itself from the cost side of things. Pretty sweet I must say :)
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Apart from the above activities I will remain active as I have been. Posting regularly and interacting with the community more or less every day. The stats for December published by 
While many monitoring tools exists for user accounts, the witness tools can be a little harder to find. Some nice tools that I came across which are worth looking into are listed below:
to get detailed witness information https://hive.arcange.eu/witnesses/This should get you most of the witness related relevant information.
The challenge for every witness owner is support. Getting votes is important yet hard. Hence, if you like what I do I ask you to consider voting for my witness:
Alternatively you can easily review your witness votes on the main front ends:
Your vote goes a long way, being it for me or any other witness. The bottom line is that I really encourage you to use all your votes. It's a small task which you could even outsource via proxy voting.
Another update will follow next month. Have a good one!
