I very much appreciated the donation, though it was not solicited and I would still be in a stable position without it, however, I still want to say that I am very appreciative of what you gave. I see that you managed to win a great proportion of the donation back just by writing about it, which is nice.
As for trying to make amends with the vicious characters who have started to attempt to attack my work here, I don't negotiate with trolls. Working for peanuts worth of rewards, and completely changing my character into sycophant just doesn't sit right.
I am making enough income through what I am powering down, and my now thoroughly revamped mining hardware to pay my bills, and continue to live comfortably enough to be able to keep working.
Besides all else, I don't have time to contend with the haters and trolls. Except nextgencrypto. I worked my butt off writing, working with the steem server software, and taking a lot of completely dishonest criticism for what I was telling people about the quality of the software, for 8 months, on and off, and I rightfully earned the 69.8 reputation that I have now, and this has turned out to be very useful against nextgen, whose atrocious trolling behaviour has seen his berniesanders account flagged to a record -16.2.
I am proud to say that it was -16.1 4 days ago, and my flags have contributed the significantly to this drop. Of course I'd rather use the voting power to shut down his randowhale racket, which is disingenous and exploitative in the extreme. We'll see how long he has the patience to continue making a public spectacle of himself, and further making the name of this platform dirty. I know I can kill cornholio if I try. What a cheap stunt that one is...
Regarding the proposed changes, since I started wrangling the C++ code 4 days ago, I have discovered that it is not as difficult for me to understand as I thought. I have finished about 80% of the work removing the unnecessary hardfork logic already, and because I have made such a big change to the code, it is absolutely necessary for my next step to be learning how to create the genesis block, and starting up an alpha network.
I have already seen some of the sections of code that I will be changing, and really, for me there is only the parts of C++'s difference between it and C that I need to really do some study to understand. Prototypes, interfaces, and this sort of thing.
You may be aware that I discovered that the witness scheduler is embarrassingly insecure, and I could not possibly dream of allowing that in a system I put my name to, so I devised a PoW based scheme that I posted about yesterday. I was an A student in advanced mathematics in highschool, and differential calculus, especially as implemented in computer code, is something I have absolutely no problem with understanding, especially simple statistical analysis.
We have a few prospective coders being talked to here and there, and some amounts of pledges for funding, though nothing concrete yet. I am not connected to the communities nor familiar with the protocols of finding such workers, so I am simply continuing to spend 8-12 hours a day working on the code, in between things. The main issue is that I have never, of my own accord, ever wanted to code in C++, except in the brief honeymoon of its first appearance in the early 90s. The more I see of the code, the more I understand why Linus Torvalds hates it so much. I seriously have not seen such juvenile, highschool grade computer programming in my life as I have seen in steemd. It is not meant to be a simple insult, I published two amazing examples that I inadvertently found as I was working. That paid programmers could quite simply have such flimsy grasp on logic, boggles my mind.
As for support, there is some 100-150 people already willing to show up and be counted, several people who are afraid of being too closely associated with me because of my unrestrained critiques, and I understand why people would be reluctant to overtly show public support, when so many of them have significantly supplemented their income.
For me, the situation is different, and very dangerous for those who might try to attack me. I was going to walk away from this, and it was you, to be precise, and prior to your donation, who persuaded me that I have a moral obligation to provide the community with an alternative to a troll, scam and spam ridden steemit. This is also why my consensus rule changes are quite drastic. I believe that, with the exception of the reputation system, which is still very weak, and the ninja mine, that this platform is a playground for nasty people.
By the way, part of the haphazardness I was having had to do with the haphazardness of the very system I am dealing with, and the attacks on my reputation by disreputable characters. Anyone who thinks that steemit's dev team was doing the right thing to ban me from the github, or who believes that I do not have the capacity to produce code, you can now go look at the code I write, and judge for yourself. I have the advantage that I am doing this for love, not for pay, and an unbounded timeline for operations. Good code is like art, you can't rush it, unless you explicitly are selling it for its rushed, unstable qualities.
Anyway, I just wanted to respond to this, as I was curious what the scuttlebutt was in the steemosphere. Thanks for your support and kind words, and now, back to teh codez.
I wish you the best of luck bud, I really do. I support anyone who sees a problem and wants to fix it with integrity. Your message here gives me hope because whilst I understand the passion you were incited to from being, in many ways, under attack, it was too unrestrained, hot and ill disciplined. Your passion to mend an experimental tool which frankly has many issues remains inspirational to me. I genuinely hope you succeed. I really don't care what tool ends up doing the job in the end, I just hope as many as possible who have earned stake honourably can protect it and that the tool ends up being an unassailable means of setting humanity free. You deserved that donation and I don't regret sending it to you for a second. Stay cool bud. If anything will make you succeed, it's love.