Witness Enhanced Setup
Because of the missed block last week (yes, 1 block is unacceptable to me), I set up a backup server for my witness in a separate location. Additionally, I created a fail-over script, based on @steempty's bash script, thanks to @timcliff for referring it to me. I modified it a lot to fit my needs, including email notification and redundancy checks.
To sum things up, here's my full witness setup. The servers are spread across different locations, I won't be disclosing the locations anymore, for security reasons:
| Server | CPU | RAM | Disk | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Witness | 4 cores | 16 GB | 200 GB | 1 Gbit/s |
| Backup Witness | 6 cores | 24 GB | 600 GB | 100 Mbit/s |
| Seed | 4 cores | 12 GB | 300 GB | 100 Mbit/s |
| Additional fail-over | 2 cores | 1 GB | 25 GB | 100 Mbit/s |
I'm running the fail-over script on the Backup Witness, the Seed and an additional VPS. The reason for that is to have a maximum fail-over redundancy. With that setup, I can still disable the witness key under my Steem account, to avoid missing more blocks, in case multiple servers are down at the same time (for some extraordinary reason, like a goblin invasion).
SBD APR
The SBD price has been on a slow downtrend for over a month now. It's not clear why this is happening, despite the rising bitcoin price as well as the altcoins. One explanation may be due to Poloniex, yes, the despicable exchange with the notorious downtimes, delayed and disabled transactions, and worst user support. I'm free from Poloniex for over two months now, and glad I did. However, many users are still using it, and are stuck with it if they don't have an alternative exchange for SBD/STEEM, like Bittrex (which I recommend). Poloniex has once again disabled SBD/STEEM transactions, this may be forcing people to sell off their steem assets to convert them to something else, to allow them to withdraw their money.
Currently the average SBD price is 91 cents, I set my APR to 7% a few days ago when it was 93 cents. As you can see, the SBD price is above 90 cents on all exchanges, except on Poloniex which is currenlty at 79 cents! Luckily, market volume has been shifting mostly to Bittrex with 73%. If I remember correctly, it was quite the opposite a few weeks ago, when Poloniex had the bigger volume percentage.
Several witnesses have set their APR to various values, but I think we need to reach a concensus on how to approach this problem.
Miscellaneous
- My witness rank went down a bit to Rank 56, was at 53 last week! Not because I lost votes, more because other witnesses gained some. It's all good though, I'm still happy. If you haven't voted for me yet, do it :)
- Many witnesses were experiencing a lot of missing blocks this week, as I was monitoring the witness-blocks channel. Shouting out their names wasn't getting their attention, so I took the liberty of sending them Steem memos to catch their attention. I think that helped, at least with one of them, isn't that right, @riverhead? 😏😉😉
- My involvement in the help channel on Steemit.Chat continues as usual.
- The fight against spam and abuse is also on my agenda.
Join us on https://discord.gg/GpHEEhV
If you really like it, resteem.
If you love it, follow.
🗳 Check out my Steem witness application and vote for me. 🗳
Thank you.
Alternatively, you can issue this command in cli_wallet (after unlocking it)
vote_for_witness "YOURACCOUNT" "drakos" true true