@ura-soul Witness Update #5 - Diving Deep Into The BlockChain

My fifth witness update - Informing you of my recent activities and why to consider voting for me as one of your list of thirty supported witnesses on the Steem blockchain.

You can view my original witness application thread (from 22nd Oct. 2017) here for more details about me and more about what witnesses do for Steem and Steemit.com. I also now have a French language translation of that application too (great thanks for @roxane for the excellent translation job). More translations to come soon!

This post is intended to be a response to @jerrybanfield's call out to witnesses to claim financial help from the @budgets account as written here in his post.

My Recent Witness Activity

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I've been very busy since my last update here, partially with the launch of my new website for Steem called Steem Ocean. Steem Ocean will be my home online for providing useful data, tools and services for Steemians that mostly aim to improve user experience here, which benefits us all. I will be hosting a variety of pages which provide insights and access to data that isn't usually available - even on other stats sites - with the general intention of making life easier for minnows and cleaning up the rewards pool exploitation as much as can be done using this approach.

So far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and the site currently provides access to a Voter Rank Algorithm that looks at all recent votes on the Steem blockchain, calculates their value and provides stats about the users involved to show whether they are community oriented, self-vote oriented or any other particular orientation you might think of. I have been told that the data has already been used to identify someone mis-behaving!

Check out Steem Ocean regularly as I'll be making regular updates and adding new features.

My Witness server has also needed my attention recently as I had to take it offline for a couple of days to deal with a memory configuration issue - I missed a couple of blocks because the Hard Drive had filled up and the block log then became corrupted. I took the opportunity to reconfigure the system so that it now makes better use of the large amount of RAM on the server and there's now enough free HD space left to keep it running for a couple of months, in which time I will have arranged a new server that has dramatically more HD space, so this won't happen again.

The Witness server is now fired up again and awaiting it's next block to process!

My Vision for the Future

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This year might turn out to be 'make or break' for Steem as EOS will be launching and @dan has already stated publicly he intends to ensure a competing service for Steem/Steemit is launched on EOS. With that in minds, it's imperative that everything that can be done to improve STEEM is done and to use it's head-start as a way to ensure continued presence and competitiveness in the face of EOS. It remains to be seen where this is all headed, but the action plan remains the same anyway - full Steem ahead!

I intend to continue providing novel tools for Steemians and providing insight that can help balance the platform so as to help on-board new users without them being intimidated or put off by the economic imbalance and complex maths involved. When I get time I will start making more videos and spreading them around the web to help share with everyone the benefits of Steem. I might even turn up on a @DannyShine video in the near future, possibly even borrowing the megaphone of justice! :)

My Current Witness Server Settings

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Specs:
8 Core (16 Thread) Intel CPU
96GB RAM
110GB SSD Storage
Unlimited Bandwidth
Ubuntu 16.04

APR: 0%
Account Creation Fee: 0.1
Block Processing Daily Average: 2
Blocks Missed: 3
Price Feed: Updated Hourly
Current witness rank: 89 of 122

Wishing you well,
Ura Soul

Vote @ura-soul for Steem Witness!


View My Witness Application Here