📝 What is "State of the Witnesses"?

State of the witnesses will be a regular update provided to the community on the status of the Whaleshares witnesses. The intent is to keep members informed of what is happening on the platform and what witnesses are doing. It is important that members of the community vote for witnesses that represent them and are driving the platform in the right direction. These updates are not intended to be all inclusive, but should only be a portion of the information used for your decision making.

In addition to the overall status, each update will also feature one witness in the "Witness Spotlight". This will allow the community to get a deeper look into the person/group behind the witness and how they play a part in the Whaleshares community.

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📈 Status

Things continue to run smoothly on the witness front, there has been no updates needed since Full Launch 🚀 We have picked up 2 new witness since the last update bringing the current total to 65. It seems we are seeing less random blocks being missed like in the previous two reports. However we do have a few witnesses that have missed more than 10 blocks. Starting last report I limit the statistics to the top 50 witnesses. A complete list of witnesses and their votes can be found at https://whaleshares.info/witness_votes/

There are currently 4 witnesses disabled in the top 50. Some have been disabled for many days and I encourage everyone to review and reconsider your witness votes. We should try to keep the top 50 witnesses as enables and block producing capable.

• lucashunter (disabled 13 days ago)
• dcrazy (disabled 3 weeks ago)
• solaceworkshop (disabled 12 days ago)
• cyberdust (disabled 3 weeks ago)

Witnesses that have missed 10 or more blocks since last report are:

• intelliwitness (12)
• black-man (22)
• kennybll-witness (10)
• ijmmaiwitness (28)
• wls-africa (87)
• desmond80 (63)
• lucashunter (49)
• hercules (33)
• fiasteemproject (297)
  
  

Rank	Prev Rank	Owner	Missed Blocks	Δ Missed Blocks	Votes	Weighted Votes	Created
1	1	powerpicswitness	16	0	361	5670800836202	8/13/2018
2	2	krazywitness	16	0	509	5301620430618	8/14/2018
3	3	bushkill-witness	55	0	355	4911915849242	8/14/2018
4	6	beyondbitcoincas	1583	0	315	3998594202127	8/13/2018
5	8	intelliwitness	81	12	223	3887194696623	8/14/2018
6	4	artwhale-witness	77	0	277	3843720827942	8/13/2018
7	7	dbread-witness	30	0	246	3841657509469	8/21/2018
8	9	bangzi	31	1	156	3809689532078	8/17/2018
9	5	jepu	54	2	307	3782854441479	8/14/2018
10	11	nepd-witness	32	1	227	3321730440109	8/14/2018
11	12	nsfwizard	42	2	169	3316997572900	8/30/2018
12	10	black-man	207	22	399	3106099631569	8/13/2018
13	16	ienrikex	468	3	236	3011646203606	8/17/2018
14	14	lexiwitness	495	0	191	2963026524400	9/11/2018
15	13	chronocrypto	21	0	185	2943901153912	9/6/2018
16	15	clockwork	29	0	112	2813035185839	8/14/2018
17	17	kennybll-witness	1084	10	144	2728575314974	8/13/2018
18	20	ceruleanblue	19	0	93	2494418025867	9/24/2018
19	23	deranged-witness	559	0	168	2420450949696	10/14/2018
20	19	contests	16	0	95	2334448868788	8/14/2018
21	18	whalebook	59	0	97	2227833929077	8/13/2018
22	26	ijmmaiwitness	117	28	146	2149042732583	10/26/2018
23	22	blckchnd	12	2	100	2126119356842	8/14/2018
24	21	startail	1266	1	82	1969823181832	8/13/2018
25	24	wls-africa	162	87	251	1840841027762	9/1/2018
26	25	yensesa-witness	0	0	208	1770673455363	8/16/2018
27	30	altruistic	0	0	211	1612878915105	9/8/2018
28	28	adsactly-witness	0	0	77	1548968342294	11/13/2018
29	27	sahkan	5	0	89	1485984571675	8/13/2018
30	29	god	102	1	167	1458582488514	8/30/2018
31	32	csxcommunity	6	0	64	1055400196724	8/21/2018
32	35	dsound	0	0	59	1052967227932	11/24/2018
33	33	aquacy	0	0	86	1029549561972	9/8/2018
34	38	profanereviews	0	0	36	893629982320	11/8/2018
35	36	desmond80	63	63	48	871665539790	10/18/2018
36	34	lucashunter	112	49	95	810585222004	8/25/2018
37	37	hemangmehta	3	0	75	810186381060	9/4/2018
38	46	moonunit	1	0	78	775917483778	10/29/2018
39	39	cuttie1979	3	0	56	713092292917	9/1/2018
40	40	hercules	34	33	27	668202055569	11/9/2018
41	43	triton-witness	3	0	111	633856285030	9/25/2018
42	51	kantos	0	0	54	625311949155	12/5/2018
43	42	tnam0rken	298	1	66	574322313269	8/20/2018
44	44	kwaskoff	5	0	47	540349703252	8/31/2018
45	47	constelacion	0	0	81	505288152150	11/21/2018
46	41	dcrazy	27	0	27	497764435684	10/30/2018
47	45	finteh	981	0	32	494683597016	8/31/2018
48	31	solaceworkshop	2	0	29	488694745820	8/14/2018
49	48	fiasteemproject	618	297	39	394394329045	10/4/2018
50	49	cyberdust	165	0	34	375792619049	8/14/2018

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⭐️ Witness Spotlight - @ceruleanblue ⭐️

📌 For those who don't know much about witnesses, in layman’s terms, can you give your thoughts on what is the job of a witness?

Well, put simply, a witnesses main purpose is to witness the transactions that are being pushed to the block-chain, ensure that everything within the transactions is scrupulous, and then verify with our signature that the block and everything within it, has been checked and assessed as valid. However, witnesses use software than handles the majority of that work for them, so all it really requires is a good understanding of your job, and regular server maintenance.

Apart from absolute requirements, there are many things that most witnesses tend to spend their ‘free’ time doing, be it promoting their projects, supporting the community through means of contests, giveaways, curation, or even simply general assistance when a new user is confused. Though these things are not part of witnessing per say, many of us to include these in our daily duties.

📌 What brought you to Whaleshares?

Actually, I had never heard a thing about whaleshares, and ironically I was working on a third party application for steem that would have reminded you all much of Whale Tokens, however upon hearing about this opportunity from my good steem pal @lexikon082, I embarked on one of the most exciting ventures I’ve been on! Though I actually did have a couple of rough meetings with some people here, after a few days talking on the platform and in the discord, I was hooked.

📌 What is your background and how does that make you a good witness?

Haha my background :P Well I am Italian so I mean, roman blood right? :wink: Haha but no for real, I am just a fun guy, I like to have a good time with my friends and when I am not doing that, I enjoy spending my free time programming computers. I have never been to school for the art, though I really would like to be able to say the opposite shortly :) I have spent at least 5 years learning various types of language from bash to ruby, and I think this greatly benefits me as a witness.

📌 What excites you most about being a witness?

This is a very simple answer for me. I came here, because I saw something I loved slowly falling apart on steem. Though I know I do not posses many of the answers, I do feel I have some input to give and being a witness allows me to do just that. Though yes on whaleshares, every voice has a say, I am in a better position to pose ideas and suggestions that will benefit the chain here.

I was on the steem chain for 1 month before I started asking why they weren’t imposing some solutions in terms of memory usage for nodes and witnesses. 6 months later, RocksDB was introduced lmfao. We have a chance here to think about the issues far earlier than they ever bothered to do.

📌 Are you running any projects on Whaleshares?

Haha oh man, nothing super important to the platform, but yes I have been engaged in so many projects the last few months my head is starting to spin :grinning:. Currently, I am doing some very interesting work on Team bHive, led by @bushkill-witness, and I am so happy to be doing so.

Aside from learning new things almost every single day, we are getting good work done on a few different projects within this team alone, varying from a witness failover tool, to a Discord bot that some of you may be getting to know :) On top of that, we have a few web services currently in development, that should be released shortly.

📌 Do you have or plan to have a WhaleToken? If so, tell us about it.

I do! I am happy to say that both myself and @kennybll are currently engaged in releasing ETERNALBLUE, a whaletoken developed to aid in compensation for small time whaleshares developers, those who are actively working on projects and services for our platform, but not necessarily on a dev team of any sorts. We have been lucky enough to receive the support of DBREAD and bHIVE, in order to further fund our venture.

📌 What are your goals as a witness?

Ironically, after several months here, my goals have diminished. I mean, I aim to keep developing, keep making fun/useful things for people, but for the most part, I want to keep things the way they are as well! Now, some of you might be thinking, ‘What, this guy doesn’t want to make changes?’, haha but no that is not what I mean to say at all. What I meant, is that I am absolutely in love with this platform, and I never want my experience to change. Grow, sure but I don’t want to see us lose our way.

📌 What do you see as the biggest challenge for Whaleshares and how do you think it should be addressed?

Two answers for this question, from a public and a dev aspect. First of all, user on boarding is a big issue we are facing. We have a few good users putting together projects to fight on that front though, so I am quite comfortable saying that all it will take is a little word of mouth, because this is an awesome place, as I mentioned before :)

That being said, I feel our memory issue is something that needs to be addressed early on. Many chains coming out today are infinitely scalable. Steem claims the same too, but the fact is the minute those witnesses nodes start costing them more than they can afford, they will be shut down. We need to change this on our chain. It would be monumental in my own opinion.

Whaleshares has extended its own life compared to its counterpart by ten times or more within its inflation rate, but what about our node specs?

📌 If you had to vote for only one witness (not yourself) who would it be and why?

Now this is a heavy question :grinning: There are a couple of witnesses who most definitely deserve this spot. However, the witnesses in question, they have already shown the world how amazing they are. I would like to use this spotlight to shed a little warmth onto an excellent undervalued witness, and someone I am quite happy to say I know, @profanereviews.

For those of you who have not had the chance to talk with @profanereviews, or as we in Discord like to call him - Chris, this is definitely an opportunity you should take up. He is a solid dude, and wants the best for the community. He stays out of the drama on the platform, and is often out performing some sort of good deed in the community, be it his Lost in Translation efforts, or simply helping a lost soul to access his bitshares wallet. These are just some of the reasons I believe @profanereviews deserves some more recognition.

📌 Tell the community why you deserve their vote?

Well a vote for blue, is a vote that will last, :) I am a witness who is here to stay. I have mentioned a few times I think, how much I enjoy my time here, and for someone who lost faith in other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, this means a good deal. The times are changing and I am here to change with them. I think to the future often, and plan for things to go wrong.

Apart from that, I am willing to learn almost anything I need to, in order to get the job done. I most definitely do not have the answer to every single question, and I am in no way the best witness here, but I do feel I am a quality candidate, and hope to have your support in the future.

A Humongous Thank You - to all who have helped me come this far.

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💡 Previous Witness Spotlights

Update #|Spotlight Witness|Update #|Spotlight Witness ---|---|---|--- 1|kennybll-witness|2|artwhale-witness 3|black-man|4|beyondbitcoincas 5|jepu|6|krazywitness 7|intelliwitness|8|nepd-witness 9|lexiwitness| |

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🚨Calling All Witnesses

If you would like to be the "Spotlight Witness" in an upcoming report, please let me know!

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📰 Witness News!

Latest activities by witnesses helping the platform.

1. @triton-witness - Discord Bot for Whaleshares
2. @bushkill-witness - Whaleshares Witness Guide Version 2.8

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   🐳 Get Involved!

   
   
   • Vote for Witnesses.
   • Want to learn more about the Whaleshares platform? See the Whaleshares whale paper.
   • Interested in becoming a witness? See the Whaleshares Witness Announcement.
   • Stay tuned with official updates and announcements on the Whaleshares Discord channel.
   

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   📚 Thanks for Reading!

   
   
   • If you find this information helpful, I hope you will consider supporting me (bushkill-witness) for witness.
   • If you are a witness and are doing something to support the community, please use the tag #witness-update in your post and it may be selected for mention in the next witness update.