Hi guyz,

I am one year old now. Much has happened since the last time.
I stopped beating about the bush and plunged my head first into the honey pot, but plunged into the whole thing and naked.
One moment we must stop asking right questions and be in the matrix, follow the white rabbit and live the experience.

The Origin

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@siavach's initial idea was to participate in uniting the Community. So we started doing it during... the holidays, we must have fun in life lol. And fun we had for our SBD, The "Steemian's interviews by @siavach & @elmetro" took us to Russia to meet the lovely @madelenfox in St. Petersburg, to Portugal for the famous Steemfest2 where we met the best of the best of Steem, to Auvergne at the @steemauvergne meetup. Auvergnats team, thank you, it was during the meet up that with @siavach we made the decision to be witness and @exnihilo.witness was born. This is the beginning of a new adventure in this new world.

A new witness is born

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The first problems, the server

Being a witness starts with the creation of a steem account. We chose @exnihilo.witness. If you do not know what exnihilo means, please click here. Do not be ashamed, I did not know it either.
Then comes the server. We chose to work with @privex. If you want to embark on this adventure, I recommend them https://www.privex.io. They are new, fast, clean, helpful, they guide you, give you good advice, their prices are competitive and we must pay them with steem or other crypto.

Server specifications

Witness node	Dedicated Server in EU
System	Ubuntu 16.04
CPU	intel i7
RAM	64 GB
Disk	2 * 240 GB SSD>
Network	1 gbps
Price	$120 / month

Then you have to remember the computing courses from university, to keep close your best friend google and ask questions to the group #witness on steemit chat. Thanks you to @gandalf, @drakos, @themarkymark, @evildido and all the others, there was always someone to answer my silly questions.

For security I mainly followed the 5 posts of @krnel.
Security set up on the server (hackers, thank you for skipping this part)

• ssh connection by public / private key
• Firewall
• Fail2Ban
• I still have email sending issues for installing Tripwire but this is the next step

To setting up the witness node, I followed the Steem-in-a-box post from the excellent @someguy123. It was maybe the easiest part.

In order to not miss block, I made some optimisations on the server

• zram for RAM compression
• synchronization of the system clock
• disabling ipv6
• netdata.io for ressources tracking
• upgrade to the v0.19.3 of the blockchain version

We also update the SBD / Steem price every 6 hours through @yabapmatt's shared program.

I must say that I am proud of our server. I learned a lot by putting it in place. This is what our server looks like today.

The power of the Community

When I started to ask question about how to become a witness, everybody warns me that it is not easy and that I must give something to the Community. We talked late in the night with @upmewhale to find out what it meant "to contribute to the Community". What is there as a greater contribution than being witness by keeping the blockchain physically up? Is my Steemian interviews is a part of that? Will help and participate in @steemalsace is taken into account? After several hours of reflection, we still do not have the answer.
However, it's true that being active in the Community is very important because at the end it is the Community that elects its witnesses.

Initially our @exnihilo.witness witness was ranked 340, today after one month we are ranked 200.

With this ranking, in a month, we processed a block and therefore received as reward of 1 Steem Power (SP). You can not imagine the pleasure and the pride of having its first block, and without any more problem.

The Community is therefore essential because the principle of publications also applies to witnesses. The more votes you have, the more steem you have.
That's why you must start with the idea of ​​helping the Community, because at the beginning, it's a losing business.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who voted for us. It's thanks to you that we had our first block. Here are the biggest contributors:

@dsound and @prc
@free999enigma
@puncakbukit
@drkent
@alishannoor
@steemalsace

Dear Steemains, if you like our work or just like us lol, you can vote for us by clicing one this picture

Other projects are in progress but it is too early to talk about them at the moment...

The new world

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This video The bitcoin bubble makes me laugh each time lol.
I often hear the sentence "to the moon" in the new world. What does to the moon mean? Maybe that there is no limit, maybe that the limit is the moon. If that's it, then you think small dear Steemains. Reaching the moon is not so far 384,400 kilometers and not so hard, it seems that we have even made it.

In my first post The new world: Day 2 - The thirsty desert, I said that this world is a desert. After a year I am more than convinced. In the new world it's us the limit, and our soul is something much more difficult to reach than the moon. We are limited by ourselves, by our fears, by our ego, by our imagination accustomed to the old world. Everything has to be done here, there is place for everyone, there is only to start and have fun. That's what I do anyway.

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You can vote for us as a Steem Witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses

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This is just the beginning...
@elmetro

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1 Steemian + 1 Steemian = 11 Steemians