NOBLEWITNESS UPDATE - 3 July 2018

It's been a week since our last post, and a lot of things have happened! Thank you again to everyone voting and supporting us! We'll continue to earn that trust through our work!

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Server Status
Both our 96GB server and our 64GB back up are running strong. There was a hiccup in our witness server yesterday evening through to this morning. This was a blockchain wide event. The short of it is: a user attempted to withdraw negative vests, causing the blockchain to freeze. For a more in-depth analysis, I'd recommend waiting on Steemit, Inc. to release a public announcement. We'll be sure to drop the link in the comments below once that's available.

Since this was a security issue on v0.19.3, Steemit, Inc. hurried to get a new patch out and available for the witness to solve the issue. In an excellent show of efficiency, we had a patch out within a few hours, and many of the top 20 applied it as soon as it was released. Some of the rest of us had to replay the blockchain on our nodes, which produced a bit more downtime for us. We had to replay both of our nodes, but the process was finished at 11:05am CST today. Both nodes are back up and running. We haven't missed any blocks since getting back up, which we're all very proud of.

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Current Standing
As you can imagine, with the vulnerability earlier today and the fact that some witnesses are still waking up to the new patch, the rankings are a little skewed. We've gained several new votes, and prior to the freeze we were at position 66 (64 among active witnesses).

That being said, I'm going to share an image with you:
Unfortunately, this isn't indicative of future position at the moment. For now, though, we are currently in the top 60 of active witnesses!

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Current and Future Projects
Supporting Veteran Witnesses - While @noblewitness already votes for other veteran witnesses as part of our campaign to support vets and raise the profile of veteran involvement in the blockchain, we have recently decided to pitch in some of our chips with fellow witness @jackmiller. He has set up a simple voting bot to provide an upvote to users who are currently upvoting the veteran witnesses (this witness included, as @anarcho-andrei is a US Army veteran). To that end, we've delegated 100SP to his bot, @thanku. To learn more about the initiative, check out his post here.

The Writers' Block - After the meeting in Gatlinburg, the witness team discussed and set on several overarching goals for the Writers' Block and for the future of the group as a whole. A post was released detailing the direction for our platform in the future from @thewritersblock which will provide the vision for what we're planning on doing next. Please check out the post at length here, but the short of it is that we are going to be setting up three independent branches to the project. The Block will still be there and function much the same way; we will have our own condenser tailored to displaying featured content to users, and; we will be launching a more mainstream small-press. With these three pieces and the way they interconnect, we are planning on revolutionizing how authors build their talent and get published, as well as how readers engage with authors and each other on a dedicated platform.

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Thank you to everyone voting our witness! We will keep you posted regularly as to our progress!