Hi Steemit!

It's been a while since I did my last witness update. While not for a lack of participation, just been busy building and working on projects.

Witness Hardware

I currently run three witness nodes, two in the United States and one in Canada. They are monitored by remote servers and controlled with a kill-switch.

I also run two auxiliary servers that handle the price feed and kill-switch.

Full Nodes

I haven't mentioned it in my previous witness posts, but feel I should mention it here. I currently manage five full nodes, three in a cluster https://rpc.buildteam.io and two private full nodes.

If you haven't tried the public full node, it is

Benchmark

https://rpc.buildteam.io/ 0:00:02.580627
https://rpc.steemviz.com/ 0:00:49.912529
https://steemd.minnowsupportproject.org/ 0:01:39.423780
https://steemd.privex.io/ 0:02:53.363142

What have I been doing?

I have been busy, real busy. I currently spend 8 - 16 hours/day using Steem and doing Steem related projects. One project I am most active on is identifying and shutting down spammers and plagiarists. I frequently put out updates of the @buildawhale blacklist which is growing at an alarming pace. Currently, over 1,000 users on the list, all researched and verified personally by me. You can find the complete list here.

Since my last witness update, I have uncovered a few large spam networks some I have made public.

Many are reported to SteemCleaners and private abuse channels.

My witness

I am currently back in the top 50 (barely), it hasn't been easy and I appreciate everyone who has supported me. I am still very active in multiple witness channels and help a lot of other witnesses both publicly and privately.

Other stuff

I recently wrote a post titled Don't get hacked - How to be smart! to help raise awareness of the increased amount of phishing going on currently and how to prevent losing your account. I suggest reading it if you feel you may be at risk.

I was recently pulled into The Steemit Name Challenge if you want to see my response.

I started a Python developer tips series where I share tips for Python users that I hope to do on a regular basis. So far I have four issues out if you want to check them out. If there is something you found useful, please give a shout out and let me know.

Python Tips Series

I am always accessible via Steem.chat, Slack, and Discord.

If you don't vote for me as witness, I'd love to know why. If you don't know much about me, have a look at my post that talks about who I am and what I am about.

_{_X48EJ}

Why you should vote me as witness

Witness & Administrator of four full nodes

My recent popular posts

STEEM, STEEM Power, Vests, and Steem Dollars. wtf is this shit?
The truth and lies about 25% curation, why what you know is FAKE NEWS
WTF is a hardware wallet, and why should you have one?
GINABOT - The Secret to your Sanity on Steemit
How to calculate post rewards
Use SSH all the time? Time for a big boy SSH Client
How to change your recovery account
How curation rewards work and how to be a kick ass curator
Markdown 101 - How to make kick ass posts on Steemit
Work ON your business, not in your business! - How to succeed as a small business
You are not entitled to an audience, you need to earn it!
How to properly setup SSH Key Authentication - If you are logging into your server with root, you are doing it wrong!
Building a Portable Game Console

Witness Update - @themarkymark