I’m ‘smooth’, well known and active in the cryptocurrency community since 2011, core team member of Monero and lead developer of AEON.
I have not been involved with Bitshares or other DPoS so operating a witness node is new to me. However, I have years of experience with development and deployment of high availability mission critical infrastructure, HPC big data, along with various cryptocurrency nodes, mining operations, and services. I’ve also been mining and operating steem nodes since the launch in March 2016.
I am one of the largest holders of STEEM independent of the original team, and my objective in operating a witness node includes working to ensure that the network is secure, reliable and scalable, in order to protect and grow the value of my stake. Although my identity is not public, I do not and have not ever operated any sock puppets or other misleading identities, and my five-year history in the community provides ample objective support for such a statement. Further, I state unequivocally that I have no affiliation with the steemit team, any of the steem developers, or any of the other witness operators outside of our normal online interactions. Thus I can promise that my witness node will be operated in fully-independent manner, faithful to the network rules and the best interests of my own stake and that of the other stakeholders.
To that end I have provisioned redundant enterprise-class hardware in a low-latency Tier 2 datacenter at an undisclosed location. This is dedicated hardware, not deployed on AWS or another cloud. There is more than ample excess CPU, memory, and storage to support rapid network growth, and all can be easily scaled as needed. Standby hardware is already online for fail-over, and backup witness nodes at additional locations will be added. In addition I will be providing a full-time seed node, currently located in AWS Singapore (IP below). These are fully updated with latest patches from github.
If you wish to support my witness node, please vote as follows:
vote_for_witness your-account smooth.witness true true
(If you have previously voted for ’smooth’, please change that vote to ’smooth.witness’ instead)
smooth.witness seed node: 52.74.152.79:2001