Witness report 2018-03-22 - Two weeks, two blocks

This is my second witness weekly report and probably my most exciting one because this week, I went from rank 389 to 127 which got me into a position where I was able to witness 89 transactions and generated my first AND second block!

@quochuy's Witness report

But, what is a block and what is it for?

Part of my decision to become a witness is to get a better understanding of Steemit and the Steem blockchain and I will also try to share this knowledge with anyone who is curious and want to learn too.

I will here to be as little technical as possible and I will have to skip a lot of info and just touch the surface of this complex topic.

As you probably already know it, Steemit is just a web user interface that sends data into a blockchain and as its name indicates, it's a chain of blocks and that's the blocks we are referring too.

So every time you do something on Steemit (or any other website on top of the Steem blockchain such as https://busy.org/ or https://utopian.io/) your activity, instead of being recorded in central database like a classic website, is sent to one of the witnesses server that will witness the transaction (we'll come back to that in a moment) and pack it in a block along with other transactions (from you or other people using the website) and then attach that block to the blockchain.

The blockchain is a file that sits on the witness, once a new block is added to the chain, the witness server broadcast its content to other witnesses servers so that they can update their local copy of the blockchain and stay up-to-date. So you can see here that, without witnesses servers, there is no Steemit, no @busy, no @utopian-io.

To explain what the witnesses do, I'd compare this to signing a contract. Say Mr. A buy a property from Mr. B, they sign a contract and Mr. C will witness their signature. By signing the contract himself, he confirms having witnessed the transaction. Now, imagine Mr. C does this full time and customers come to his office to get their contract signature witnessed. To avoid wasting time going back and forth in the back office to archive each contract, the put them in a folder until it is full and go hang it in a folder hanging storage. The folder is a block and the folder hanging storage is the blockchain.

To improve speed, even more, Mr. C expands and hire 19 more people to work as witnesses with him in his office. They all take turn to witness each transaction and then go hang their folder full of contracts. The capacity of the folder is the block size, the larger the folder, the less frequently they need to travel to and from the back office.

With the Steem blockchain it is very similar, our top 20 witnesses take turn to witness every transaction that we make and file them in a block filed in the blockchain but they only have 3 seconds each to perform this operation or they lose their turn, miss the block (and the reward for doing the work), and slow down the user experience as the witnessing of the transactions they were supposed to do will have to be done by the next witness. To help with all this, one witness below the rank of 20 will be randomly picked every cycle as a backup. So, in every cycle, there will be 21 witness operations taking each 3 seconds for a total of 63 seconds.

I hope this overly simplified explanation has been useful to some of you.

What happened since the last update

First of all, thank you to all who voted for me as a witness

My second week as a witness has not ended yet and at this right moment, I'm at rank 129 (101 if only counting active witnesses still producing blocks on a regular basis), 26 voters and one user who set me as his voting proxy.

First, thank you to my top 5 voters who shoot me all the way up here:

@neoxian, I don't know you yet but I will spend some time discovering what is it that you do on the platform
@dang007 and @khoa are a great supporters of the #vn (Vietnamese) community
I wish @qurator best of luck if your new Witness adventures
@jackmiller is a very dedicated witness who already paid his server 12 months in advance!

I also thanks all my other voters: @j85063 @make-a-whale @dodybireuen @valorforfreedom @evildido @superoo7 @mazzle @bobaphet @samueldouglas @tubcat @cryptofrench @steemitshopaus @carlpei @black-man @liberyworms @r-k-m @gilabola.mania @proto26 @thebluewormbim @ruoxi.wang @cnandofer

Thanks for supporting and believing in me.

Two weeks, two blocks (and counting?)

First two witnessed Steem Blocks.jpg
I'm very lucky, thanks to all the voters above, who allowed me to witness transactions and generate my first two blocks. I was very excited, yeah I know, why get excited for two... virtual... blocks in the digital world that just contain strings of data... Let say that it just the fruit of all my effort, I have now given one more thing to this community.

If you are curious to know what's inside a block, check my second block here:
https://steemdb.com/block/20883811

Helping others

I've been spending a little bit of time on https://steem.chat/channel/witness and https://steem.chat/channel/help trying to help where I could and met two new witnesses that were in trouble with their witness installation. The Steem blockchain is still young and as such, it is evolving so fast that any tutorial written today might contain deprecated information next month... The worse part is that after 7 days, you are not able to modify your post anymore. So a lot of new witness wannabe users are starting on the wrong foot. Having gone through this myself, I still had fresh info on the current situation and offered my help to @valorforfreedom from Steem School, the very well known @qurator and @yensesa from Ghana. Both are now witnesses and awaiting for their first generated block.

@valorforfreedom has been working very hard since he joined Steemit, posting twice a day every day and is sharing a lot of knowledge with others.
@qurator is a curation guild with a sole purpose of promoting quality content created by hardworking users.
@yensesa is an exchange allowing Steemians in Ghana to exchange their STEEMS or SBD into Ghana Cedis.

Both of them have been giving a lot to the community and if you feel they are worth it, please go vote for them.

I've been also trying to explain what a Witness is and managed to get few people to start voting for their first witnesses. @bobaphet a fella from #teamaustralia has even made a video introducing the concept of Witnesses to his audience.

My contribution to Steemit security

You might have noticed my several post about Steemed Phish my Google Chrome extension I've developed to help people notice external links that takes you away from Steemit.com and might lead you to a fraudulous clone that will still your login and password and drain you off your hard earned SBD and STEEMS.

PLEASE KEEP YOUR KEYS FOR YOURSELF
PLEASE ONLY USE YOUR ACTIVE KEY OR POST KEY
KEEP YOUR PASSWORD SOMEWHERE SAFE

The project has got some success with @utopian-io who gave me an epic upvote, thank you guys!
@dodybireuen from Indonesia talked about to this audience: @dodybireuen/chrome-extension-steemed-phish-tool-untuk-mendeteksi-phising
it has inspired @wdoutjah to write an article explaining what Phishing is all about and gave me some ideas for improvements:
@wdoutjah/understanding-phishing
@runicar's bounty is reaching its deadline soon, the best extension will win 50 SBD as a reward for helping the community from the scammers.

Config changes

I've changed my price feed process to send a price update only once every four hours instead of hourly, there is no advantage of updating too frequently
I've followed the lead of some other witnesses and set a price bias of 200% to reduce the printing of more SBD while its price in the market is dropping quickly. It's now back to 0%.
I've started to read the Steem blue and whitepaper and will have to read again and try to understand more

Two new cronjobs on the witness server

The first one runs every day at 6:45am, right before I finish my shower and at 4:45pm before I finish work. Its purpose is to send me the last 3 lines of logs from the witness service to my Discord bot that wll then send me a private message. This allows me to check if all is OK.
45 6,16 * * * cd /opt/steem-docker && ./run.sh logs | tail -n 3 | sed -e 's/th_a application.cpp:514 handle_block ]//g' | sed -e "s/\x1b\[.\{1,5\}m//g" | grep "block" | node /opt/discord-notifications/notify.js -p

The second one runs once a day at 11:59pm, counts the number of blocks I've generated and send me a private message on Discord if I do generate at least one block.
59 23 * * * block_count=$(docker logs witness | grep quochuy | grep Generated | grepdate --iso-8601-c) && node /opt/discord-notifications/notify.js -q -m "You have generated $block_count block today"

That's it for today but before I say good bye, thank you @timcliff for his weekly curation of witnesses reports

Good bye...

^{Vote for your 30 witnesses

Vote for me with SteemConnect}

Credits

The images above have been generated with the Canva app using my own photo.