RE: What the fuck do witnesses do?

Yes our witness went down last week for reasons that I don’t feel like saying publicly but involve someone who’s worked with me to run the node. Will be back up soon and witnessing blocks however instead of courteously saying anything to me over DM, other top 20 consensus witnesses decided to immediately talk shit.

If you expect to be a top 20
Witness you shouldn’t need anyone to tell you, you should have systems in place to notify you and even redundancy.

It takes 2 seconds to disable your witness, which should have been your immediate action upon hearing about this 8+ days ago. Also the moment I started "publicly stating my opinion" in your discord you started trying to shut it down (I quit, I'm sick of your fake bs).

If you're asking people to review their votes, maybe you should examine your own votes first ?

You get upset because someone notifies your witness is malfunctioing in a public channel (which apparently you thought was some "private channel" so not even sure why this bothered you), rather than just DMing you about it. Yet you seem to feel its perfectly fine to then attack them for this in as public a way as possible. The hypocrisy here is a bit much.

Also, as far as I can see you, you make these attacks without asking anyone if your random guesses about reality are even close to accurate. Would you like it if people started making random accusations about you, then published them without even a basic check about the truth of the accusation? You're suggesting @gandalf isn't adding value to Hive? He's one of the key contributors here and works an enormous amount of hours on Hive.

Open and active discussion is fine. Accusing people publicly without even a hint of due diligence is not.

Witnessing blocks isn’t the only thing a witness should be doing

Although we can agree on this, it is still the first thing they should do. And the fact that you do something else does not in any way excuse you from not doing it.

Yes our witness went down last week for reasons that I don’t feel like saying publicly but involve someone who’s worked with me to run the node.

This indicates that you were well aware of the problem.

I find this worrying because it means that you are delegating your governance responsibilities to someone who does not meet the criteria of reliability expected of a witness, especially when highly ranked.

If you couldn't fix it, all you had to do was disable your witness. Was there no one, you or anyone else on your team, who didn't know how to do it? If that was the case, which is even more worrying, why not ask for help?

Instead of courteously saying anything to me over DM

I don't rely on anyone to tell me that I'm missing blocks, I have set up the necessary monitoring tools. I expect the same from my fellow witnesses.

... other top 20 consensus witnesses decided to immediately talk shit.

We just pointed out to you that the primary duty of witnesses is above all the reliable production of blocks. Is that talking shit?

If someone makes a video like what I did, you get attacked in more ways than one

Regarding your video, what is criticized is that you express your desire for the witnesses to do more (which is perfectly fine) while, at that very moment, you are not even providing the basic work that is expected.

... (including having our witness go down shortly thereafter)

Does this mean that you have delegated your governance to someone untrusted? This is even more worrying!

The subsequent campaign to talk shit is merely proving my point

Talking about subsequent campaigns, what point does this one prove?

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A new card game on Hive coming soon, funded by self-voting and farming LOL, we must question if it will benefit Hive

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Ad.1. Actually it's the only thing required. Everything beyond that is extra, which is, of course needed if one wants get actual votes. If a car has a great entertainment system but can't drive, is it still a car?
Ad.2. Which is irrelevant for properly executing witness duties.
Ad.3. You mean those witnesses you call "regime", "rent seeking", or ones who "don’t deserve their top 20 spot but have held it so long" are expected to babysit your witness operations? Still, DAYS before this, in response to your post:

RE: Take Action: Support Active Witnesses on Hive

I wrote exactly this:

A witness's job is to provide security and reliability to the network. They are expected to produce blocks.
I think you are literally missing that.

https://images.hive.blog/DQmTn7mLYnzsrHFgRaEjqmKTXRdE9Mb4w8eqvhKjmkBQZmk/onejob_miss.webp

Discussions in chat evolved days later.

"Open and active discussions about things like this should be widely held and praised for happening."

Cognitive dissonance is strong here. I'm all for raising awareness of how important active governance is, but you wrote a post about witnesses while ignoring fact that your witness wasn't working. If you had done what you were asking for in that post/video, you would've seen for yourself that you shouldn't vote for your own witness because it wasn't doing its job.

You talk about hypocrisy and witness duties. That would be funny if it weren't real, and if it weren't actively hurting the platform that we're building here.

You've ignored my comment about missing blocks, ignored comments in the chat, ignored your infrastructure monitoring (or never it), didn't pay attention to any of the witness voting pages that exist (most of which clearly shows the status of your witness), and ignored all public monitoring services reporting the missing blocks. For days.

"witnesses decided to immediately talk shit"

Missing blocks for days is objective proof of incompetence as a witness. Written on the blockchain.
I'm just a messenger, like the others who pointed that out. Nothing personal; it's just a simple fact written on the blockchain.
The proper witness response would have been to disable the witness and apologize (in that order).

@neoxian, at the same time, was missing blocks. He responded in a few hours, and disabled his witness in less than 10 minutes.

Less than 10 minutes, not more than 10 days. Do you see the difference? Have you seen any drama related to that?

Yet you spent the entire next day to advocate removing votes from us (I guess that's the "widely held and praised for happening" part). While your witness was continuously missing the blocks.

"If someone makes a video like what I did, you get attacked in more ways than one (including having our witness go down shortly thereafter)."

It's not about the video, but about how ironic it is to fail as a witness and post such a video at the same time.
Again, it wasn't attack on you. It was just multiple attempts to make you realize that you weren't fulfilling your witness duties.

What's more intriguing here is that in above quote it seems like you’re implying something even more malicious - that the issues with your witness were not a result of negligence or incompetence, but some sort of coordinated attack?

While I agree that there needs to be a regime change, this witness vector may have been a misfire. In the end, all power seems to stem from blocktrades and smooth-including control of the 20 witnesses and the dao. Even the lesser big powers are kept in a checkmate because of this.

I am not too familiar with the whole inleo thing, but groups like hivewatchers would kill us small devs-I am a case in point-who uses the chain for data, instead of another blog. you and theycallmedan were speaking about the need of using the chain for data for an AI database [in violation of hivewatchers "post it on hive first rule"], and the impossibility of storing images to hive (you can). No, I am not a dev asking for work, and I am sure your own devs can figure simple things like that out; It's rather easy, just convert the data to base64 (or maybe something else more efficient) and develop a chaining mechanism to piece longer files together.

Reaching out to the dash (and other) community is one of the many things that steem should have been done nearly a decade ago (and i don't mean the obyte air drops). Many things in business comes down to the proper marketing, and part of that is the ability to network both internally and externally. Those who focus on internal marketing tend to be myopic and have tunnel vision and blow thousands of dollars on projects that don't add value while also harming hive as an investment. While they focus exclusively on Chrony capitalism on the DAO throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks at a cost of millions of dollars (which has proven to be ripe for abuse), you have welcomed in another chain (in what capacity, I don't know). You are right for calling out the "governance"-but the witnesses aren't really the governance. They are just hand selected block processor at the behest of a single governor, king blocktrades the unready. There is no decentralization at all; those claiming hive is decentralized perhaps could be liable for fraud.

You, splinterlands, and actifit seems to have a lot of use on the chain, and the latter just seems to be yet another front end. I could be wrong, but with your developments (which I am not familiar with),I see that as translating into that you have a lot of power both in terms of people and ability. If you were to fork, or move to another steem based chain (even steem), on an exclusive basis, I think that could be a serious dent in the hive ecosystem, as well as free marketing in their outrage. I am not advocating that you do that, I am just illustrating a threat/weakness to the ecosystem.

However, if you were to team up with the other serious projects, and try to bring in more investors during the next bear market, it might be possible to bring and end to the kakistocratic reign of blocktrades. Even getting investors working with you, for a single purpose of usurping the governance later, to staking hbd now for the 15% returns might achieve this the next time hive drops down to a dime (just watch out for the hair cut rule). Also think of it this way: if you were to usurp the governance, your team would have full control of the dao much like blocktrades pretty much does now.

But before then, it would be handy to learn what the contributions are from the witnesses-and develop a witness notification system for your own witness node so you can be ready for a takeover. Some witnesses have mission critical projects, so best not to pee them off. Some of the people you might have peed off could be allies in a successful coup; it is best to eat crow while it is young and tender.