Hello.
I am quite new to stemmit and not a programer. I am crypto currency fan and Larimer vision's fan. Member of the Bitcoin foundation since 2012 and occasionally bitcoin miner. I am studying steem in order to better understand eos. I woul like to run a node at steempool.net (Germany) but unable to set the steemd config.ini probably because I am not a witness. May I still help?
Thank you for your willingness to help but since you are not a witness, it would be unfair to make you have expenses instead of those who already get their block producing rewards.
Fortunately situation with nodes improved since the time when I wrote that post (it's quite old).
Of course, you don't need to be a witness to run your own Steem node. It's actually a great idea to get some better knowledge about this platform.
For your own needs you can follow same instructions that are for exchanges (using your account name). It's a consensus node that runs account history plugin for a single account (your own in your case).
I think I will cover such configuration in my next episode of Steem Pressure.
Good luck.
Thank you for your keen and clear answer. Anyway even being an absolute fan of Larimer's general goals for humanity and definitely considering him one if not the major "blockchain thinker", of present times, on the way to provide a blockchain technology able to be the future of the internet itself. My old believes as a bitcoin miner get my into hard times in truly understanding the value of DPOS. It is good that the miners (the witnesses) don't compete between themselves, but to become a witness is the big challenge. I would deem interesting that the voters for the witnesses get a reward for their vote, a little bit like the bitcoin miners who join a pool and get a share of whatever block a miner of the pool has the luck to produce, . i.e. I am trying to figure out the would-be functioning of a Steem mining pool
Oh, you are wrong.
They do and that's great.
There's a lot of blood, sweat and tears on the blockchain.
Everybody wants to be better than others which in this case is serving the platform the best they can.
Otherwise, the minimum that they have to do would be as simple as generating blocks i.e. running single machine with some software on it. Monkeys can do that.
Also, it's not really a mining. Most of STEEM goes to non-witnesses, i.e. authors, curators, shareholders. Smallest piece of cake is shared between the witnesses.
It's not the witnesses who are important on this platform. It's YOU. Those who have Steem Power and vote.
If a witness doesn't do what you expect (within your subjective opinion about being best for the platform) you take away your vote and such witness is fired.