Christian Lains has asked all the witnesses to create a weekly report of our activities, so here's a short summary of BlockTrades' progress this week:
Most of our work this week was devoted to security and infrastructure improvements to the BlockTrades and OpenLedger transaction processing systems. We configured a couple of new servers as redundant backups using mirrored RAID drives. We've unified the way we manage the cryptocurrency wallets and other processes between OpenLedger and BlockTrades to reduce our daily workload (which speeds up the rate at which we can handle customer problems). We also made security improvements to the way we handle our cold storage wallets and databases. We've added additional Munin monitoring processes to detect upcoming potential problems on our servers (for example, SMART detection on drives to provide early alerts of impending drive failures).
On the steem coding side of things, Dan Larimer told us that his steem client is still occasionally falling out of sync, so we're re-enabling compression of the log files so that he enable logging in his client and send them to us for analysis.
Support-wise, we continue to assist new users in learning how to convert Steem Dollars to Bitcoin. We also gave assistance to some new users of our “fast-confirmation” feature that allows for rapid confirmations when buying cryptocurrencies such as Steem with Bitcoin.
Can you please be a bit more cautious with your upvotes in the future? As a steem whale, you are going to be instrumental in showing the community what is acceptable or not, when it comes to posting and earning. By upvoting unoriginal work, plagiarism, or low quality posts, you unintentionally incentivize this to continue in the future.@blocktrades,
Please have a look at the following examples, taken from the last few hours:
Plagiarism:
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@lenar79/with-respect-to-the-exchange-cryptsy-ceo-conducted-an-investigation-of-fraud
Completely wrong tags/low quality (NOT photography or steemitphotochallenge)
https://steemit.com/photography/@matthewtiii/blue-bee
Plagiarism:
https://steemit.com/money/@kevbonneau/why-are-edibles-stronger-than-smoking#@drinkzya/re-kevbonneau-why-are-edibles-stronger-than-smoking-20160812t132216217z
Plagiarism:
https://steemit.com/facebook/@rainchen/this-women-bought-a-lettuce-from-tesco-and-she-found-caterpillar-in-it-what-she-does-in-tesco-facebook-page-was-awesome
Plagiarism:
https://steemit.com/cyberpunk/@vlad/dieselpunk-atomics-collection
Hi @anyx, I appreciate your efforts to detect outright plagiarism without attribution, but I also think you've committed a "sin" of a similar sort here by by putting what I consider a comment unrelated to a report on my witness activities. You can contact me via dm on rocketchat as blocktrades (I don't login there much as it tends to freeze up my pc, but I do get emails).
As far as my votes go, I recently began letting my wife do some of my voting since I don't have sufficient time, so she's just getting the swing of things. Moverover, I'm willing to give newcomers a little more leeway as far as their posting goes. As long as they correct their post, I'm willing to let them keep my upvote. I did unvote the dieselpunk post, since it hasn't been changed and it was near payout and also the unattributed coindesk cut/paste article. As far as tagging goes, I'm pretty lenient on people's tagging right now, since the tagging system works so poorly right now IMO anyways and it's not uncommon for people to not understand intent and usage of tags, especially if they are new to a platform of this type. The only thing that I've treated as a cardinal sin in tagging was the abusive "steem/steemit" tagging, which generally removed the post from my consideration for an upvote.
Also, although I'm all for original content (assuming it's something I consider useful), I do and will continue to vote for people who find content that is of interest to me as long as it's properly attributed. I don't have time to scan all the sources of data out there, so it's a useful service to me.
Good to know you are on rocketchat, perfect. I have to shout from the rooftops about this stuff all the time, and I wasn't sure how to contact you.
Attribution and article discussion, is FAR different than copy-paste, I hope you consider this in your upvotes.
Thank you!
interesting to hear that you wife is doing the votes. i would love to hear, if your votes for my posts were your votings or hers ;)
about the witness report. i thought that you guys are just running servers and keeping the blockchain on that server ;)
might be interesting if anybody could write a post on how that whole system works.
Thanks for the report and MORE importantly thanks for all you do behind the scenes and on them to help make this community as awesome as it can be!
I am so excited that I found Steemit and absolutely love the platform that it runs on and feel that this could truly be REVOLUTIONARY!
I am new to Steemit but have spent the majority of the last 2 days reading articles and composing my own. Today I inspired 17 people so far to join this community and will likely inspire more each day. I also wrote my first two articles of of which is on why I believe Steemit can and IS REVOLUTIONARY!
I would be honored if you wold read it and give me any feedback as I am new to Steemit but feel like I grasp its potential~
Best Regards~*~
https://steemit.com/revolution/@quinneaker/why-steemit-is-so-important-and-even-revolutionary#@miki/re-quinneaker-why-steemit-is-so-important-and-even-revolutionary-20160813t024032747z
Hey ! First of all - thanks for the heads up, nice work !
I was wondering if there are any advantages if I have more then 1 witness in my config. Is it possible to have more then 1 of them in the queque if I mine from 1 machine ? Let's say I use 8 threads, so 8 witnesses in config or is there no difference at all ?
Thanks in advance for the answers !
It's been a while since I looked at the mining rules much, and there's changes related to it in the upcoming hardfork, but in the past I know that you generally should mine with multiple witnesses so that you could continue mining once a witness gets into the queue.
Thank you very much I was looking for that as well
Safety above all!
Good job, keep it up !
Thanks for this update. It gives an encouraging sign that Steem is moving ahead. I think the adoption of more security feature is badly needed after the last hacking incident which really put a dent on the image of steem.
nice article. good job. :) I am following you
We appreciate everything that you all do to improve steemit and continue to make it a success. I'm just glad to be a part of it.
nice post ...... keep it up:)
Excellent, I just joined steemit and I am reading up about mining. Good idea about posting these updates. Good work guys!
Ok... @blocktrades , I am still trying to get the gist of this...but it takes a lot of think work!
The security also is important ensuring all currency is safe.
Hey, this comment is not relevant to your post above. But I just wanted to thank you for your vote last week. I have been working quite hard on my blog. I have two main themes to my blog: (1) providing a video series (helping traders trade successfully and grow their coins). (2) I've been working on a comic strip (Steemer and Friends). You kindly voted on an episode of my comic strip, and I just wanted to thank you for your support :)
Thank you very much for your support @blocktrades, you are the best!!!