Yeah I agree! From everything I have seen a person would really need to be in the top 50 or so witnesses to be profitable. That is why I have never done it to be honest.
I would have to be in a position with more power and influence before I deploy a witness and start campaigning for votes. I have a unique set of skills I feel would be beneficial.
Edit: On a side note I just thought of something. Kind of like they had the hack-a-thon this year at SteemFest maybe it would be possible to set up part of a day to explain certain things to the Witnesses that they might not realize or best practices to optimize their setups. That could strengthen the network. I recently saw that some of the witnesses were running with too little ram for the volume of transactions we are doing currently. Things of that nature and other issues to watch out for.
A lot of the discussion happens in the steemit chat quite regularly, but yeah, it may not be a bad idea to keep that conversation going or talk about some of the details in person as well.
I haven't heard a lot yet but did anything crazy come out of the Hack-a-thon?
Anything super interesting?
I spoke with the winner who had a system to easily tag posts with a location so travelers could easily see posts spread across a map created about specific places. Pretty cool concept. I got too caught up in conversations to participate much (and I was jet lagged for not having any sleep since the night before).
That location tag system sounds pretty cool!
This is a pretty open ended question but based on what you saw and talking to the Steemit INC and other 3rd party Devs do you see a ton of opportunity in creating profitable 3rd party apps on the STEEM blockchain?
Also are you going to post any pictures or videos of you surfing? Rumor has it you tore it up out there! LOL
One thing that was clarified for me recently is that the company is Steemit, the website is steemit.com and the blockchain/token is STEEM. I think they are dropping the "inc" part as it's no longer needed for clarity.
It's hard enough to make anything profitable, let alone profitable in the speculative environment of cryptocurrency. I have no idea, but I think Smart Media Tokens do have the potential to shake things up a bit. Ultimately, if a company is providing value and can do so at higher rates their their expenses, that's where profit comes from.
I don't have any pictures of me surfing there (but I did take the sunset picture I put into this post). The waves weren't that amazing anyway, but I have an older post with some pictures of me surfing in Costa Rica which you can see here.
Yeah I had seen those Costa Rica pics before! You look pro out there!
steemitworldmap.com
pretty cool kid with a good story. is the site for the guy who won the hackathon. @martibis
Nice! Thanks!