Announcement: Charlie Shrem Advisor to Steem and Witness Proposal
Hey All,
Up until now I have been very successful on Steem. By posting chapters of my book and other stories over the last several weeks, I have shown the community and myself what's possible in the new world of blockchain and creative content. Historically I have been one of the leading entrepreneurs in the cryptocurrency space, and Steem represents a new chapter for the technology and my career as a thought leader and innovator.
As an advisor to the Steem community, you can expect me to bring my insights and savvy to entrepreneurs working on Steem-based projects in order to help grow the community and create meaningful partnerships.
In addition to SteemPower.org I will be working with Ned, Dan and the Steemit team on a weekly basis in addition to many other Steem projects. If you have a project, please reach out to me and I’d love to help!
We want to support new projects that add a better user experience at the same time developer tools and documentation.
You can contact me at [email protected] or in Steem Chat.
Witness
Yesterday I launched a very powerful Witness for Steem under SteemPower.org
Throughout my career I’ve did my best to maintain neutrality and independance. Being a public speaker and in the public spotlight, I am accountable for my actions and in the past have done so.
A few days ago I hired @garethnelsonuk as a full time engineer. Gareth was the co-founder & CTO of BitInstant and is a full stack engineer. Under SteemPower.org he has build our high functioning markdown editor and our steem witness. He will be maintaining and upgrading our witness in addition to building new projects and tools.
Our Witness is based in Northern California and seed nodes are in the USA and Europe at the moment. Our plan is to have high redundancy and backup nodes which we already have running.
Our price feed is running at 0,20,30,45 minutes past the hour every hour and you check it out at https://steemd.com/@charlieshrem.
It works the following way:
1 - get the BTC/STEEM price from as many sources as possible and average it out
2 - get the USD/BTC price and average out
3 - get the BTC/SBD price
From that we to obtain the USD/SBD or USD/STEEM rate.
Some of the specifications of the Seed Nodes are:
Xeon E5-2670 quad core
16GB RAM
160GB SSD harddrive
CPU's are clocked at 2.6ghz
You can connect to our Witness at 52.52.92.99:2001 or seed.steempower.org
We would appreciate your vote the following way:
- https://steemit.com/~witnesses click the arrow next to my name.
- In the CLI wallet: vote_for_witness YOURACCOUNT charlieshrem true true
Welcome @charlieshrem, I think its great to have big bitcoin personalities like yourself on board so you have my full support.
Please tell @garethnelsonuk to tune the price feed according to dan´s post regarding sbd stability
Working on it!
hey there, that's actually next on my rather large TODO list
It seems the doom and gloom posters saying Steemit is dead were sorely mistaken! Lots of exciting developments in the last week! Even the currency bounced ;)
Would someone please explain to me what a witness exactly is? Or perhaps link me to an article with an in-depth explanation?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@shenanigator/official-steemit-faq-rough-draft-your-edits-are-needed
Scroll down (or ctrl+f witness)...
Wonderful, thank you kindly.
I wrote a guide to answer this question :) https://steemit.com/steemit-guides/@pfunk/a-full-steemit-user-s-guide-to-steem-witnesses
If anyone read my last post about how your witness vote does not matter, I will now show you a prime example of how Steemit, Inc can control the witness list. Before announcing his candidacy as a witness, @charlieshrem received the above votes.
Notable employees include:
@dan @dantheman @ned @val-a @jamesc
@jamesc currently votes for one, and only one, witness.
This was enough to place him at number 21 on the witness list. Within a matter of hours (minutes?).
EDIT: The following appears to be un-related. See below.
Do you believe me yet? Your vote does not matter. Steemit, Inc. controls the witness list.
Probably because I unvoted them since the systematic voting on some accounts. I am now more motivated to conduct social network analysis to discover team voting groups. Here are the data what made me unvote them.
Edit: I don't want to blame people got voted here. They really added value. But some of them got suspected by the community and I need to clarify,
Good job, you mapped out a social network. You'd only be the 1 millionth person to do such a thing. Can you find the bitshares/steem team social network? Maybe with witness voting. Try and see if you can do it! I doubt you have the courage to report your findings.
I totally believe that you will unvote my analysis post if the post is unfavorable to you.
You must yell "clayop is witch hunting!" 😉
I will 'unvote' your post if it attacks (including by implication, or obviously selective reporting of "data") people for voting however they see fit, whether those people are me, people I like or support, or people I dislike or don't support. If you don't like their votes, vote differently. Just because you quote it and put an exclamation mark after it in a clumsy attempt to preemptively defuse the criticism with ridicule does not mean you aren't doing it. You are, and I will oppose it with my voting power.
Thanks for the promotion, buddy!
Could you mention me more often? :D
I actually don't believe Charlie should be in the top 19 and my voting absolutely was not to get him up there.
Thank-you for the clarification. This does seem un-related.
I understand your position and I hope I can prove to you I deserve it in the coming future !
Others first prove themselves then get position.
Dev's placed you in top 21 before you even set witness node and made a post.
Just curious about this, because to my knowledge I was the first one to vote for charlie as witness and I only did so after configuring the witness server - how are you determining this?
That is something all witnesses do ongoing and receive the trust and votes for it over time.
I was asked directly earlier in the day for a vote, and now I'm assuming many other people were too. To be completely candid, I didn't expect him to jump this far this fast. I expected him to end up in the 30-50 range and just slowly accumulate SP much like the other backup witnesses do (and I did for a long time).
For me - charlie is someone outside of the existing "groups" that exist on steemit today, much like myself. I joined steemit of my own accord, then started doing and working on things. I saw him do this as well, with his posts and the projects he's put effort into so far.
I kind of feel for @charlieshrem... this whole situation could have totally been the same, except with my account as the focal point. So I'll just close out by saying if we're going to highlight an issue, it's the voting, and not charlie himself.
My 2 cents.
I couldn't agree more. Jesta for witness!
I agree! My post was not about Charlie.
You took the steps and you seem know the best way!
@jesta
Part of the problem is that people want to believe that that Steemit is rather decentralised or anarchic. They are dissapointed ideolically.
Steemit has nothing to do with anarchy or decentralisation so far. We need to accept this. Steemit is a free market capitalism scheme, based on inherited plurocracy.
Plutocratic and free market are contradictory. When you have power to vote and influence, because you hold a stake in a company, it (eventually) motivates more wise direction by those with more influence. It is not always the case but eventually there is a scandal and afterwards consolidation.
Meritocracy is based on having influence indexed by your 'skin in the game', if you direct the group into a dead end, then as the biggest holder, you make the biggest loss.
"meritocracy" is a fancy way to hide ingroup preference and all types of bias; why there were/are less black men in silicon valley and wall-street. This isn't a comment regarding Steemit. I just don't like the cultural meritocracy revolution. Same shit, new names.
You know, you know where you can go if you prefer the social networks where hidden, non participating users completely regulate the agenda of discussion, social networks that still haven't got a working business model that yields actual profits (You do realise that Twitter and Facebook still haven't turned a profit, right?).
The bad behaviour of big stakeholders is bad for the network as a whole, but it is worse for them than anyone else, in terms of the result in their portfolio. I have an idea this is why regular stock markets include 'Preferred' stocks, where people can hold a stake without having any influence in the democracy within the system - they simply may not want to. In the case of this system, the reason for such a variant not having voting power but getting bigger yields is visible: Unlike in a corporation, voting provides yields to those who get the votes for their ideas. If you don't want to vote, you get no benefit of having a say but no benefit in exchange.
It is a recent change, you can now, yourself, disable your voting power. But it does not take your voting power's monetary value out of the equation. It should come back to your share in part as a dividend. I see several big stakeholders who seem to me to be unhappy about having to be active voters to gain a benefit, they hate the constant seeking of their attention and the attention seeking behaviour in general. Their share of vote rewards does not return to them unless they vote, in the form of curation rewards. I think it should be possible to own a stock in Steem without granting vote power.
Group preference is a natural outcome of a group, as all individuals have preference and as a total there is a tendency for the group towards certain things. As I say, if you don't like it, build your own, go somewhere else where there isn't a monetary impact of human behaviour. The developers of Steem are working to liberalise the rewards for participation more outside of vote power allocation based on share, but you can't just do something and then say it's solved without monitoring and adapting it to the result.
I think that even in the 2 months I have been here, there has been significant changes in the way people are behaving because of the changes in incentive that have been made. It is definitely a better place now than then, and the devs don't rest, they keep monitoring, reading people's ideas, and the best ones have a way of bubbling up to the surface and becoming clear imperatives.
Besides, the only thing the Whales have in common is a big stake in the success of Steem. This is not a criteria that leads to nepotism. That can only come from privilege granting from a top-down hierarchic arrangement. Here, you can jump in at the top if you slap down enough cash. Maybe you think that disadvantages you because - like me - you don't have a lot of cash. But over time, having good ideas can prove to be more powerful anyway. I started with nothing, and from good ideas I have built up my power to influence, and anyone can do this if they are determined and have good ideas.
@l0k1
Nop. You can inherit money and still operate on free market. most of the world functions like that. Money is power. You do whatever the fuck you want if you have them and it is pretty much "free market".
Money = power as does voting = rights so a free market can only exist to those whom maintain the network and whom hold its value within the network. A community is going to have disagreements but should always maintain the data allowing time to tell. Personally, all of yall are heroes in my book! Rock on~!
well loki, I like what you wrote and my addition is this:
Our actions show what we think of Steemit. We are here. We post or reply often. It means we think it is something worth our most valuable resource.
Idealists; the perpetually disappointed
Nice turn of phrase there @radioactivities ;)
Good job on your posts ! They are important.
To clarify, I approached people individually and simply asked for their vote. Some said yes and some said no. I've been working on this witness for 2 days and wanted to make sure it worked before I made a witness proposal. Some voted before I did make the post though. I hope this clarifies!
I am voting for you now, Charlie. You are a great benefit to the community. Thank you for all the support you have given to Steemit. God bless you.
I can tell you that the reason I voted for @charlieshrem is that he PMed me (specifically, at 2000 GMT) and asked me to (and after considering the request, I decided it was a good idea). I was not contacted by the Steemit team nor was my vote coordinated with their votes in any way. I can't speak for any of the other voters.
I voted because I noticed him posting a link in the telegram chat, and I had been meaning to actually make a vote for it, at some point...
Yo charlie, for me as an investor the biggest thing holding me back right now is this: How will video/photo uploading be worked out ? - Can we decentralized this ? - ipfs? - sharding? can we do this asap?
excellent his post, valuable content in it thank you very much
Congrats on becoming an advisor. I see the steempower.org site looks good, but on my mobile there is a blank screen. I will email this to you.
Hey, drop myself an email at [email protected] with details including what mobile browser you're using and i'll look into it.
Good job. Thank you!
I voted for you now :)
Regarding your markdown editor - it's good, thanks for the development.
But it lacks really convenient feature - uploading images and gifs through drag and drop. It'd be a time saver if you implement such functionality. To give you example, check how it works here
Welcome Charlie! Glad to have you as a witness :)
Flagging because I disagree with the way Charlie was voted in as a witness before his server was even up and running. Also, this isn't worthy of almost $600 even though the Steemit boys disagree.
You continue to appear the most objective and honorable with your actions.
Thank you
Hey Charlie, it's good to know why you suddenly got so many votes.
Are these typos?
16GB seems low for a drive, and you don't want anyone connecting to your witness server!
Right, I was thinking the same. He probably meant Seed.
That's the seed node, the witness server is not public of course
Probably meant 16 GB of RAM, which is about right for now. (8 GB still works though.)
Your extraordinary
Thanks for all you are doing for the Steemit Community. I have watched several of your interviews.
Can you figure out how to add a counter to the markdown? Or a little HTML script that will work on the platform. This would be huge to see how many users actually view our posts. It could be a third party post view counter or something off the blockchain where you could see the stats. But this would be awesome to see the views. A lot of users have been talking about this feature. Thanks in advance for anything you can do to help us out.
PK
That's easily doable and i'll add it to the TODO list
Could probably knock it up and have it live by tomorrow
Charlie, congratulations on your advisory position. It is great to have someone with such a high reputation in the crypto community on the Steemit team.
You shouldn't share your witness node IP address as it could be DDOS'd to make you miss blocks / lose votes. Cheers man good luck on the runnings
It was clarified/corrected in comments that is the seed not witness.
Ah. Thanks smooth. I didn't read all the comment. Appreciate the reply.
He can't lose votes he can just miss blocks.
Missing a large amount of blocks is enough to get your witness votes removed. :/
Not in such environment :)
You sir, are full of shit.
Steempower.org is running a free, opensource script that you mearely cloned from https://github.com/pandao/editor.md
Steempower.org is an exact copy of the examples page.
If that is why you hire a developer, i'm your man as well!
The editor is indeed based on editor.md - I don't believe anyone has claimed otherwise?
Charlie requested me to setup a site with that editor available, so I did so - I configured the server, installed nginx and a FastCGI process (you may ask why FastCGI is needed - it's because the editor is just the first part of the site, more is in the works - though for now you're right that it's mostly from the examples). Since you can not see the backend or the planned features you are making assumptions you should not make.
If I wanted to be pedantic and literal - out of the HTML on that page, only the DIV ID and the chunk of javascript lower down the page is an exact copy, the actual javascript code and the CSS is of course also an exact copy because the site does in fact use the editor.md component.
It also happens to run nginx on top of Debian GNU/Linux - but if it was REALLY needed I suppose I could knock up a custom httpd-only OS kernel (seriously - osdev is a hobby of mine and an httpd in a kernel would be fairly simple).
Would you like a custom steempower OS? I can't promise it'll be as efficient as the Linux kernel with nginx on top, but at least it wouldn't just be using a free, opensource kernel that I merely cloned from. It'll take me a week or two though, and since it is a lot of effort i'd want paid for it, but I can do that if you'd like?
See https://github.com/GarethNelson/Zoidberg for an example of my work in osdev - put on hold right now due to focusing on steem projects, but if you want to replace what Charlie is paying for a couple of weeks i'd be happy to write a webserver OS for you, and then i'll write a new markdown editor so it's all completely original, because how dare anyone use code that was already written when providing a useful service.
Apart from setting up the webserver (and taking care to ensure it'll both be scalable in future and remains secure) I also setup the witness infrastructure and took care of securing that too.
I'm proud to say that BitInstant was never broken into even once despite multiple attempts - the single security issue we had was in fact an issue with our domain registrar that I had no control over. I'm bringing that same attention to detail over here on steem and me and Charlie have some big things planned.
Skip all the post filling, tech looking talk. It's just like air. Feel free to fill up 4 pages of text with things you might be doing, i don't care unless it's up and running. So you setup a VPS. Good. Setting up a full running witness node takes like 15 minutes at most on a blank server.
Yes, Charlie did.
Anyway, don't feel like starting a flamewar. Charlie's name is dirty. Always been, always will be. Proven and sentenced. This is yet another proof. I rest my case.
Most of that comment of mine was slightly sarcastic - the main point is you're calling Charlie a liar and criticising my own work for the high crime of reusing existing code - something anyone sensible does.
There's something called "Not Invented Here syndrome" - it's generally seen as a bad thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
Charlie not that I'm complaining here. But isn't there some sort of run up process involved in becoming a witness? I noticed that @nextgencrypto was not on the list at all and I'd like to vote for him as well as you, but I don't know how to find ones not on the list. Nevertheless there are people that have been trying for months and some how you got it right out the gate.
Is there a trick to this of some sort?
Guy's apologies. When I posted this it looked like there were no comments at all. Internet is shitty here.
https://steemd.com/witnesses
You should checkout @picokernel's project with this https://steemit.com/steemit/@picokernel/first-ever-steem-wallet-released
but it's already on top of the the trending page :)
Good luck in your new role Charlie - shake that ninja mined tree for all of us ;)
that must be 160Gb SSD, surely?
Was a typo, its fixed!
I need an upvote to my steemit post. This is the link: https://steemit.com/steemit/@collin22000/how-to-make-your-child-smarter
Voted! Thanks for evangelizing Steemit. It's appreciated.
wow thats crazy..... i was told come over to Streemit , cause YT is power triping