Preparing my official announcement for becoming a Steem Witness. My own companies are heavily in alignment with what Steem stands for and want to contribute to solidifying our network by accomplishing some of the following:

1) Bringing new users to the network: I will invest in not only bringing in users, but hopefully getting them to grasp the bigger picture of promoting quality content. It is very important that every new person who joins not only the Steem community, but also the crypto community is exposed to the ideals that Steem has brought us.

2) Supporting infastructure with decent witness seed, and ticker set ups: This is a big area of concern for me in terms of having plans for my own companies to utilize Steem for anything. I strongly feel that the system should reward more witnesses, but also have a better incentive to maintain solid seed nodes.

4) Give the general public more ways to utilize Steem and Steem power outside of the normal platforms: My companies allow users to pay in cryptocurrency, but there is a special use case that I have for how Steem and Steem Power work. Some of my most important plans are to explore new means of monetizing users by accepting payment in an indirect fashion. I am looking for some way for users to be able to pay with Steem power through delegation or other means where they do not part with the underlying equity they have worked so hard to build up. So for example being able to pay for a $50/month insurance policy by delegating "x" amount of Steem Power to my company. Along with this I would like to utilize the platform to build new insurance models that are social and give the insured more control of whom they are grouped with. Utimately, giving them more power to control their prices, but at the same time keeping it sound statistically.

5) Support more businesses SmB businesses in joining Steem to help the network grow faster. Currently, we have many influencers from other platforms joining, but I feel that having SmB's join and utilize the platform for marketing in a non spam plus targeted fashion would help not only SteemIT, but crypto as a whole. Many people around the world and regulators cannot get beyond Bitcoin's use case for crypto. People need to see how the Steem model can be applied to the relationship between businesses and consumers in a way that does not produce large amounts of spam. If more businesses can join SteemIT and be responsible part of the community it would be a giant leap forward.

6) Find solutions to help charity projects tie into the Steem community. Either creating a more simplified way to donate small amounts to a charity or by helping to coordinate the use of curation trails and delegation to charities. I know that we already have this, but teaching groups like charities how to utilize the Steem model for fundraising is important as it will spread the benefits of crypto to those people in the world who need it most.

7) Help to expand things like Steem Poker League (SPL) and @SPL itself with some of the earnings. Projects like these help create stickiness on the network that will help the network reach its tipping point faster.

I am just waiting for the provisioning of my server with @Privex to get my dedicated server running. There will be a more extensive post in the coming days with more details in terms of what my positions are, how I plan to use funds, and the projects I have planned to improve as well as bring new users to Steem. I do have a background in Server Admin, Network Admin, and more. In comparison to some of the more technical witnesses I don't think I am quite at their level, but I feel I am ahead of most other witnesses who have no IT background.

Witness Server Spec's: 

Germany Based Dedicated Server

256 GB DDR4 RAM

2x 480 GB SSD

Xeon E5 Proc

50 TB bandwidth @ 1 Gbps

Seed Node Spec's:

Working with Privex to get a build with a large amount of memory (128 GB+) that is cost efficient, but is a solid full seed node that isn't swapping all the time.

Ticker Server: This will not be a VM on one of the other two machines, but will be a bare minimum set up separately.

I would like to use something different than the majority of other set ups to improve decentralization, but I really don't want to have to screw around with the Python-steemfeed I have seen as an alternative. I am open to suggestions if anyone has some easier to troubleshoot alternatives.

Failover/Redundancy:

I will not immediately have any failover for either the seed or witness server until I am able to generate some money to cover the cost of having something decent. The plan for the back up servers would be locating them in another region to obtain as many 9's as possible in the future.

I promise not to skip on providers or hardware, we definately need to see more solid seed nodes out there until there is a solution to the high memory usage.

More to come soon!

Follow me @ByzantineHash so you don't miss the official announcement, I certainly will need help and guidance on this long journey that I am about to begin.