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One small step for Whaleshares, one giant leap for @bushkill - Witness Post

bushkill-witnessPosted for Everyone to comment on, 6 years ago9 min read

Who is bushkill-witness?

You may know me as @bushkill on Steemit and Discord, the "bee guy", or just recognize me as the guy with that crazy beard of bees. @bushkill-witness is my account specifically for my Whaleshares witness and all things Whaleshares related. My @bushkill account will be strictly beekeeping related. At least that is the plan.

I'm relatively new to Whaleshares compared to many here, but that does not mean I'm any less committed to it's success. My journey to this point has fully convinced me that the team and community behind this effort is top notch.

My Beliefs

Too many times I hear people complaining that things aren't fair and it is why they can't get ahead. I totally agree that life is NOT fair. But get over it, it is not fair for everyone (I understand not to the same degree). The choice is yours, you can spend your life playing the victim or you can look for new opportunities to succeed. Yes you will go through some unfair things in your life, but the opportunities for success far out weigh the unfairness if you work for it.

I don't want to turn this into a rant, but will say that Dr. Thomas J. Stanley states that 80 to 86% of millionaires are self made. Or you can listen to any of the Dave Ramsey "millionaires hours" where they call in and tell their stories and 99.9% are just regular hard working people.

I will just finish this with one of my favorite quotes from Thomas Edison, who was unsuccessful a 1000 times before successfully inventing the light bulb.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. - Thomas Edison

So what does this have to do with being a witness?

Well my success was not accomplished single handedly, I have had many great people who gave me opportunities, advice, and acted as role models. I can never forget their unselfish giving and risk they took based on a belief in me and my willingness to work hard. This continues to drive me to want to help ambitious people with opportunities for advancement and success.

  1. I have been a Boy Scout leader for over a decade and have mentored multiple scouts to Eagle rank (and a Girl Scout for her Gold award).
  2. I have been district coordinator for Engineers Week for 8 years, where myself and 4 dedicated engineers visit every class in our district every year and promote engineer by doing challenge projects with them.
  3. Two years ago I became a professional mentor for Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH), which is a new type of school that brings together the best elements of high school, college and the professional world.
  4. Recently I started a weekly "lunch and learn" program in our organization for the Early Professional Hires (EPH), those with less than two years in our company, that where interested in learning about blockchain.

My desire is to expand this list to include helping people across the globe and I see Whaleshares as a great means to accomplish this. I think Steemit has done some of this, but it has suffered major abuse by parties seeking financial gain. One thing I always try to do, and recommend to my mentees as well, is surround myself with exceptional people. When you do that, you start acting like them and become a better person as well. Likewise if you surround yourself with troubled people, it won't be long until you are in trouble.

The Whaleshares community has impressed me from the first day here. Starting at the top is @officialfuzzy, I am continually amazed at his generosity and belief in people. He seems immune to being pulled into the mud and can always move the discussion forward in a positive way. He is the epitome of someone who has had unfair things done to him yet focuses on making positive things happen. My hat is off to him. The others in the Whaleshares community that I have gotten to know and am equally impressed by their generosity are @akrid, @krazykrista, @powerpics, @freedomexists, @alexpmorris, @anritco & @jepu. These are the people that I want to surround myself with (I'm sure there are others that I have not gotten to know yet) and will guide me to helping others.

At this point, with the Whaleshares platform still in it's infancy, having a complete plan is not feasible. However, I have created a WhaleToken to help share my stake within the community. I will back it with my initial dev team stake and continue to grow it with earnings from my witness node. The token is bHIVE and look for my first contest for a logo to be posted soon. I have already had discussions with others about continuous support/sponsorships of weekly curations shows and contests. So keep an eye out for coming announcements. I will also do my best to follow the generosity and goals of the great people that are making this new platform become a reality.

My involvement with Whaleshares Community

When you first join steemit, it can be a bit overwhelming and I checked out a lot of different Discord channels, but it didn't take too long to realize that the Whaleshares Community was the place for me. All the other channels faded from me and I spend all my time in Whaleshares. Once I started getting to know things a little better I started to chime in and help out the new folks. Shortly after that @krazykrista asked me to be part of her welcoming committee which I immediately accepted.

After a couple of days struggling through helping people create bitshares account I knew there had to be a better way. There where many how-to posts, but the problem with how-to posts is that they time out and can't be updated when changes come along. So then this leads to new "revised" or "updated" versions that also time out eventually and it becomes a viscous cycle. Many outdated how-to's that cause people frustration figuring out which one to follow or worse yet getting wrong information while following one. So I went off and created whaleshares.info that provided step by step screen capture instructions of the various processes need to use Whaleshare tokens.


artwork by @anritco
In the meantime, @akrid and @jepu where working on a "hub" site for all Whaleshares related information. When it was time to go live, I offered the whaleshares.info domain to them in an effort to truly keep things consolidated and simplified for new users. So we teamed up and the screen capture instructions become a FAQ on the "hub" and the "hub" project became whaleshares.info and hosted on one of my servers. Shortly after the announce of the new Whaleshares platform, we hooked up with @anritco to combine all our efforts into his vision of a "Whalebook" that will be a one-stop place for all Whaleshares information. I won't spoil @anritco's thunder by getting into the details, but I assure you that it will be a site you visit often. Now that the MainNet has been launched we can start to focus on Whalebook.

As part of the dev/launch team I have been involved in many activities behind the scenes as well as the Official Whaleshares Discord answering questions and helping people get prepared for launch. I have been coordinating witness updates through TestNet stages and have taken over maintaining a "Witness Guide" that will be released soon.

The hardware and commitment

I am a hardware development engineer for large mainframe computers. I spent 15 years as a RAS (Reliability, Availability, & Serviceability) engineer on the worlds most reliable computer platform. I know the importance of continuous availability and commit to giving my full support to the Whaleshares blockchain.

Although the platform will start off small, I believe it will take off like a rocket in growth once people experience the great opportunities it will bring. So I have chosen to run my witness node on a much larger hardware configuration than is currently required to allow for uninterrupted growth. I also commit to grow the configuration to always stay ahead of the blockchain growth and will be adding a back-up witness in the future.

I have named my server bowhead-whale1, after the Bowhead whales that are known to be among the longest-living mammals, living for over 200 years. It is currently a 4-core processor with 16GB RAM and 80 GB SSD.

First block generated

Accounts distinction

I have been heavily involved in promoting beekeeping on the internet since the early days. I own and run two well know beekeeping forums and host many beekeeping organization websites. My initial intent when coming to Steemit was to create a beekeeping knowledge base to recruit new members to Steemit from my large list of internet contacts. I started the "Beekeeping for Everyone" series as well as other beekeeping posts. The problem I ran into with getting new beekeepers to Steemit was that my blog was cluttered with non-beekeeping posts which made it confusing and not appealing. So my plan for Whaleshares is to keep the @bushkill account strictly limited to beekeeping and this @bushkill-witness for Whaleshares and other content.

Thank you

Thank you for taking the time to read my witness thread and if you think I am worthy I would appreciate your vote. I can be reached in the Official Whaleshares Discord - bushkill#6791



How to vote

Please click on over to the Witness Voting and turn me Blue!



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