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

They are the natural progression of a flawed economic system. In the end, all social media platforms on the Internet have a promotion system.

I would much rather a system where good content gets rewarded and bad content gets buried. Neither seems to happen very often before or after bid bots.

^ 6 minutes make-up tutorial that most women that are old enough to use this site already likely know how to do. Not a single bid bot was used.

Comment with zero bid bots. Now a -15 Rep user.

My concern is there are now 100+ bid bots, most of which have zero care of quality and most don't run any form of blacklist. There is almost no incentive to have Steem Power other than delegating to a bid bot for the largest ROI available outside of Self Voting 100% 10 times a day.

What does the witness want to do to make the blockchain more user-friendly and help to onboard new users. What do THEY personally want to see done and what will they do to get it there? - @ericwilson

I think onboarding and marketing are the most critical issues. Before we can successfully do that, we need to fix the economic and scaling problems or we will lose more of our most valuable asset (users).

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 a big fan of vote decay. It will turn the community into a non-stop election. There is very little incentive for users to vote for witnesses and most don't do it effectively.

I do see cases where vote decay would help solve problems like user death or if they decide to spend their time on EOS instead.

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

There is no right number, but I think that's a fair number. I think having more than the top 20 slots is important but having too many dilutes your influence.

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

Spam
Scaling
Centralization

Spam makes us as a community look bad and untrustworthy. Our technical growth rate will exceed hardware unless we solve the scaling problem. We are heavily dependent on a small group of people to do 99.9% of the work.

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

Removing Spam
Fixing Scaling
Moving towards decentralization

I think the content focus needs to be reduced for the blockchain to thrive. We need users to have more reasons and ways to use Steem (i.e. dAPPS). If the primary use case of Steem is to create shit posts, power down, and sell to an Exchange we won't be around long.

The majority of users are doing the work which is what I call the process of creating content and creating wealth with little to no investment. The crypto form of sweat equity. The problem is we need that many or more buying Steem to prevent the downward pressure on the price.

There will always be good people creating good content and doing good work that will be entitled to this wealth, but there can't be 99% take and 1% give. We need more reasons to buy steem and incentives to hold it outside of just delegating to bid bots.

What is the monthly cost of equipment? - @abh12345

~$400 plus non-witness equipment.

Where do your earnings go? - @abh12345

I haven't powered down, and it is paid powered up. I pay my bills out of pocket.

Community Delegations

22,250 Helpie
1,000 Minnow Support Project
5,000 C-Squared

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

Global Blacklist API
Anti-Abuse / Anti-Spam
Provide hardware for SteemFlagRewards
BuildAWhale
Providing Helpie witness hardware and management
Supporting Helpie Community
Writing Prompts Weekly Contest
Multiple dev projects that are not public at this time

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

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

I believe the question you are asking is what's the benefit to others for a good witness, but it might be what's the benefit to the good witness for being a good witness.

Either way, the answer is kind of the same. A secure, stable, and reliable blockchain protecting your assets.

How do I become a witness? - @steemingmark

Obtain a reliable server with the minimum specs, learn how to set up and maintain Steemd. Then blame yourself for everything that goes wrong on the blockchain.

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

~$5 USD

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

A witness is a person or team who produces blocks for the blockchain, runs a stable price feed (hopefully), and votes to approve or deny forks.

If they do that reliably, they are a good witness. That doesn't mean they are a good person or as you call it worker.

Since there are only about 60 or so profitable witnesses slots right now, we should demand more from our witnesses. I believe witnesses should provide value to the blockchain and community. Although technically it isn't in the job description, the community sees witnesses as much more than they are.

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

I wanted to pull my support for HF20 because I felt it wasn't ready yet. This would have been witness suicide. As it was, I lost some big votes because I held off upgrading to v20 for a couple of days even though it was the right decision at the time.

I would like to see more time prior to cutting over a hard fork. More idependent code review and more complete test net. These are both are far more difficult than they sound.

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

I believe the better question is how does a new user educate themselves on which witnesses are competent and support their ideals.

Should we have interest for SBD? - @patrickulrich

No, not until market conditions stabilize. It's like fixing your fence in a hurricane.

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

I have very little voice, witnesses will follow what the top 20 do, forks need to happen more often so we get better at them, and more testing and code review needs to be done.