Thank you Jerry (@jerrybanfield) for creating a fund for the witnesses that despite not being able to meet the server cost (due to low ranking in the witness list) are still investing their time and effort in the community building.
That's a very selfless effort. Kudos.
(I have seen in the past that you had Unapproved your OWN witness, just to free up a vote to promote another newbie witness. Your >1600 MV Whale Vote is big enough to jeopardise your witness ranking. That sets an example of Selflessness.)
My Witness Server
As mentioned in my Witness Update Published on January 16, 2018; my Server is now much Bigger, Better and Bolder and is capable of supporting the surge in number of transactions per block.
I am glad to see that the server is running responsibly with following Specs
- 32 GB ZRAM
- 100 GB HDD
- VPS - hosted by AWS
- HF-19.2
- Account Creation fees = 0.1 Steem (updated)
- Block Size = 131072 bytes (Updated)
- Total Witness Votes = 26
My Contributions
Though I am not techie person, but I am contributing my time in making Steem/ Steemit more popular among Indian Community.
We are testing with a small bot called IndiaUnited that supports quality content from Indian Audience. Once that bot starts running perfectly we plan to reach out to whales to get delegated SP and encourage more quality authors, artists, and content writers from India.
Thoughts on the development of Steem
Well as of now, the following thoughts cross my mind.
1. Putting an end to Bid-Bots:
- Its not Proof of Brain as suggested in Steem White Paper - its proof of business
- This distorts the reward pool massively - I have seen people sending bids of like 200 SBD, and overnight they gain quite a decent reputation score... Which in fact is total fallacy.. A REPUTATION has to be built over time...
2. Increase the Post earning period to 1 Month: Since the post is earning for only 1 Week, bid bots helps in getting the desired result. But a question that we should be asking to ourselves is, why are we running against time? If technology permits, we can safely increase the post reward period to a month or more. Statistically speaking, the post earns most amount of its reward just few hours of its publication and then the earning rate is FLAT. Let that flat curve sustain for a longer duration, and wait for organic earnings which is fair for all.
Other option could be, to reward the post in two installments. 1 Week Payout and 1 Month Payout.
3. Recognize the content on the platform as an Asset: One of the ways Steem could be valued in future is by analyzing the quality of the content on the platform. Therefore it is important for the community to encourage Diversified content on the platform that is original (and not a picture of a Rat, sourced from Google and Upvoted big time by a Bid bot - example). This attitude has to flow across from Whales to all community members.
4. Create Curation Teams: Curie is doing an amazing work in promoting quality content, in a similar biz model, Whales can form a team of curators (by topic) and delegate them the SP and Task to manually curate good quality content. Thus recognizing content as an asset and valuing it.
Support me as your witness
The above are some of my thoughts on developing and promoting steem, and I would like to work towards them.
If your thoughts resonate with mine, do support me as your witness.
Here is the simple two step procedure
Option 1 Go to this website - https://steemian.info/witnesses
Click the green thumb 
and enter your password.
Option 2
Go to https://www.steemit.com/~witnesses
Scroll down the top 50 witnesses list and type "bsameep" in the box
HAPPY STEEMING :)
I really like where you went with
Thoughts on the development of steem
Your items are spot on and would in fact be, IMHO, an improvement. The FLAT curve and the bi-monthly reward system make a great deal of sense.
As well a thanks to @jerrybanfield for the budget account of 100 steem.
I just did get my witness running last week and will have a seed server up by the end of next week.
Granted I own a hosting company so I have access to bandwidth and equipment so the overhead is not as bad for me. But that being said it is equipment and bandwidth that I personally will have to take care of if I bring on a new client and need a couple for dedicated servers to deploy his application and that is a highly likely scenario.
Another way that would help the lower end witnesses financial burden would be to bring them into the block rotation more often than what is seen here. https://steem.bitcoiner.me/schedule/
I will likely through a witness vote your way as I see you are looking seriously at how to improve steemit. I just hope that your recommendations like mine do not fall on deaf ears. Until we are whales our post still don't steam much on STEEMit.
Hey thanks for dropping by... Good that we share a vision, also good to see that more people with entrepreneurial spirit are working together to make this platform great..
We all are 'minor' shareholders as of now
Witness vote on your name :)
You have some very good proposals. Thank you for your approach. I also would like to see a longer reward period, or endless reward period based on weeks. I’d like to be able to give rewards to posts I’ve read that are closed for business so to speak...
Many thanks for your love.. :)