It's been three weeks since our previous witness update and we have accomplished quite a lot during this time. We are building steadily for the world to realize that steem is the best all-around blockchain running.

Yet the fruit of our work will ripen slowly and what is probably on most people's mind right now is not what will happen in 2 - 3 years but rather the current slump in crypto prices. Many of those who used their steem income to pay for life's basics have seen their fiat incomes shrink and possibly feel a bit glum.

For all this people, let it be known that we will never let you down

Casting Rita Ora in bronze and covering the bronze with fine gold sheet might well give this, the landmark monument of Luxembourg city, symbol of remembrance for the fallen heroes.

^source

Speaking of fallen heroes, my style of music is rather this one ("Don't tread on me", Metallica)

But never mind, you are not here to listen to music, are you ?

Short recap

@lux-witness is the cosmopolitan witness hailing from the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg (the whole 2582 km² of it) built by @pstaiano (electric guitar, the "Jimi Hendrix of steem") and @sorin.cristescu (drums). We set out to be:

1. Competent at minting blocks and securing the blockchain transactions
2. Complement the work done by more technically-oriented witnesses by going out and explaining why steem is the best blockchain in production status in order to
   a. bring more quality content creators to steemit and busy and the other apps
   b. bring the power of the steem blockchain in the business realm and harness it for business applications
   c. work to get STEEM and/or SBD quoted against fiat currency (as opposed to other cryptos) in order to facilitate buy-in and increase the integration of the steem ecosystem with real life economies.

Where do we stand

The daily job

You guys want to read articles, write articles, publish photos and videos, upvote and get upvoted and, of course, get paid. To make all that mechanic turn round, there is this mysterious chain of blocks that makes it all happen.

The job of a witness is to be ready and, when his turn comes, to validate and append a block to the ever-growing chain. In other words, nothing of what you expect to function would do so if it wasn't for the witnesses.

Since we started, about 2 months ago, we haven't missed a single block, which is more than many witnesses can say! We stand at rank 119 among active witnesses and, needless to say, we hope to enter the "top 100" soon!

Lots of thanks to those who approved our witness, we are doing our best to be a professional "blockchain grower" and have also set up a seed node at seed.steemit.lu:

The next plan is to get hosting in Luxembourg (our machines are in Germany for the moment) and also set up a full RPC node.

Going the extra mile

Being a witness doesn't require more than running a server. But if we started on this path, it was not for the rewards, but for the love of the blockchain.

We have a vision and a mission: to make more people discover the power of the steem blockchain and use it to solve real world problems!

All on the blockchain

On the first "workstream", I have continued spreading the word about steemit and busy on classic social media media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. On the latter platform, this article, published of course first on busy.org, is faring pretty well and drew attention in my network which, at 1000+, is not negligible for such a small place.

I have also engaged in a local "blockchain lobby group" that got some visibility in the press, which should provide more opportunities to battle against the intrinsic reluctance of people to engage with complex topics. And God knows the steem blockchain is complex. But slowly, more people hearing about steem will ineluctably mean more content the deserves to be read and that draws eyeballs to steemit.

The versatility of steem

This blockchain has implemented and offers a significant number of advanced functionalities that make it most suitable for integrating as component of corporate IT architectures. I've been an IT enterprise architect for 13 years now so I know what I'm talking about.

In corporate settings, a software component lives and dies by the quality of its APIs and integrations. steem offers very powerful APIs that are leveraged in the excellent condensers offering a smooth user experience (the layman user doesn't need to care about the underlying blockchain); in the many third party applications that integrate steem directly as user-management and accounting back-end; and in the more elaborate information systems that exploit the blockchain data such as @jesta's SteemDB.

In addition, the smooth user key and authorisations management, the magic "custom_json" transaction extension and the superb integration offered by steemconnect make the whole stack eminently adaptable and usable for various purposes. Here is an illustration of how these can be combined in a completely novel application, "Steem Monsters", with its almost "one click" purchase option

This wealth of functionalities and versatility has emboldened us to try something you might call crazy: re-purposing a clone of steem to implement a pan-European data sharing system which has been bogged down by lack of accounting for the value of the data contributed by the different parties. This system is the "European Financial Transparency Gateway" and more details can be found in this article.

Pay with steem or SBD

Last but not least, we are also making (timid) progress on extending the "surface of interaction" between the steem currencies and the fiat currencies. Our medium-term plan is to demonstrate locally how easy and convenient it is to pay with SBD in a bar. If we manage to get the experiment running, we'll report here.

Conclusion

This is it for the time being. If you think we are doing a good job and are worthy of this wonderful system, please approve our witness !. A big "thank you!" to those who support us and our work.