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I welcome you all to the very first edition of Meet Our Hive Witnesses interview series in 2026. Although this is the seventeenth interview since I started the series last year, it marks our first edition for the new year.
As we all know, witnesses are the backbone of the Hive platform, the unsung heroes who ensure everything runs smoothly. They operate critical nodes that keep the platform alive and thriving. Without witnesses, Hive wouldn’t exist, and without us, there would be no content to share and engage with, which is why we need to get familiar with who our witnesses are.
That's why I've created this special edition of "Meet Our Hive Witnesses."
This interview series aims to connect with our witnesses, giving you a closer look at the people who keep Hive running. We’ll dive into their work, motivations, and insights through a series of thoughtful questions.
It is the seventeenth edition of Meet Our Hive Witnesses Interview and before I continue with the introduction of the next witness that has honoured us to be interviewed, I'd like to say that, as a Hive user who want to see this platform continue to grow and flourish, we all have 30 votes to cast for any Hive witness of our choice and I will say this is the most important 30 votes you will ever cast on this platform for any witnesses that you deem it fit.
Joining us on this seventeenth edition of Meet Our Hive Witnesses is Stresskiller with over four decades of computing experience, from early home computers to building custom PCs, @stresskiller now serves as a dedicated Hive witness, ensuring reliable block production, fighting plagiarism, curating daily, and actively guiding users toward responsible witness voting.
Welcome to my interview, it is a great honour to have you here on the show this week in the year 2026 as my first guest @stresskiller
Thanks, below are the answers:stresskiller
1 What motivated you to become a Hive witness, and how long have you been serving in that role?
@stresskiller Since 1979 I have done all kinds of things on computers, programing in basic with 16kb memory on an Aquarius computer , gaming on the Commodore 64 , Gaming on the Atari 2600 , Gaming and programing on the Amiga 500 , Amiga 1000 , including running a BBS with 1200 baud modem and a 20MB harddrive. In the end we had 2x 9600 baud modem on the Amiga BBS +/- 1991.
Since 1992 i have been building my own PC's and through the years i have done many things on PC and this year i was going through my spare hardware and decided to setup a witness, i have the bandwith to host it at home.
2 What do you believe is the core responsibility of a Hive witness, and how do you personally fulfill it?
@stresskiller A witness needs to be online 24/7 ready to produce a block on the chain, at my current rank i produce a block every 3 hours , i make sure that if i have to maintenance on the server or router that i do it within those 3 hours so that i won't mis a block .
3 Can you explain how your witness node is set up and what infrastructure you use to keep it running securely and reliably?
@stresskiller It's a small mini PC sitting underneath my monitor here at home, i still need to hook up the UPS sitting under my desk to make sure it can stay online during power outage for +/- 1 hour and shutdown in a controlled way without losing any data. Securely the witness is behind a Pfsense router / firewall running on my homelab with proxmox and also behind a adguard custom DNS.
4 What challenges have you encountered as a witness, and how have you worked to overcome them?
@stresskiller The challenge was making sure everything works, i installed portainer on the witness server to keep track of the Docker containers .
5 What specific contributions have you made to the Hive ecosystem outside of maintaining your node?
@stresskiller I'm constantly reporting plagiarism to hivewatchers, when i spot it during my curation , i used to curate for Qurator back in the steemit days and in 2025 i started to curate again for Ecency .
I also run two communities but those are not as active as i wanted them to be , mainly because i had some health issues in August.
6 In your opinion, what differentiates a great witness from an average one on Hive?
@stresskiller Hard to say i believe that when we start our witness we do that with the idea of helping the platform.
It used to be about the money for a lot of the old witnesses but with the current hive price i wonder how long they will remain online.
7 How do you engage with the Hive community, and what should users know about the importance of witness voting?
@stresskiller I'm pretty active on hive communities Discord servers , on some i moderate on others i try to help people to find a solution for their problems. What people should know about their witness votes is that a witness could stop at any time and if you as a user don't take the responsabilityto check that once a month you end up voting for 10 witnesses that stopped working + 5 years ago .
During my curation i also check if people aren't voting for inactive witnesses on https://primersion.com/witnesses , and if they do i leave them a friendly reminder in a comment.
So far i have left hundreds of comments and only one person was upset about it .
8 What are your top priorities or goals for Hive’s future, and how are you helping achieve them?
@stresskiller My main priority is to have fun and enjoy other peoples posted content , interact with them every now and then . Yes i don't always discuss the curated content , often i just leave a vote and my standard text , and some days i do engage with the people about their content. But i will check the content for plagiarism and make sure people either post original content or source them correctly, every day i spend +/- 2-3 hours curating content looking up photographs if i think it's to good to be true , it ussualy is .
9 Do you support any particular proposals or improvements on Hive? If so, why are they important to you?
@stresskiller i had to look this one up because i only new 3 out of my head ;)
Ecency , keychain and hivewatchers , ecency because i still prefer their interface over peakd, although the witness page of ecency is just very poor design .
Keychain is something i use on pc and mobile .
Hivewatchers, decentralised or not without any form of control you will get chaos.
And since i'm personally agains plagiarism and hivewatchers has always been very good on fighting that.
Worldmapping and HBD stabilizer i had to look these up :)
Worlmapping is a nice project i've used it in the past and i forgot how to use it.
But a lot of people are using it and more people should be using it including me .
HBD stabilizier , i'm not a financial person but keeping the hbd on 1 USD seems to be important .
10 What do you think Hive witnesses should do better collectively to improve the blockchain?
@stresskiller Hard to say i only have been a witness for 2 months , but if you decide to quit as a witness for whatever reason , let your voters know and turn of your witness properly by using https://hive.ausbit.dev/witness and login and select disable witness .
11 How transparent are you with your operations, and where can users track your performance or contributions?
@stresskiller My operations can be found on the blockchain , nothing to hide my witness performance can be found :https://hive.arcange.eu/witnesses/ and if you want to see who is making the blocks right now https://hive.arcange.eu/schedule/
12 What do you wish more Hive users understood about how witnesses work or what witnesses do?
@stresskiller The responsability they have to use their votes , if you want to change things use your votes
13 Have there been any moments where you had to take a difficult decision as a witness? If yes, what was it?
@stresskiller No not yet .
14 Are there any technical or political limitations that restrict your ability to contribute more as a witness?
@stresskiller Not that i'm aware off , maybe i'll start an extra node on the homelab in 2026
15 Why should people vote for you as a witness,what makes your witness stand out from others?
@stresskiller Hmm tricky question i'm not better or worse then any other witness they al runn the same OS and same program , that also makes you wonder why should the top 20 get better rewards then the rest of the witnesses if you look at https://cutehive.com/ you can see the differences in the rewards.
Maybe the top 20 has more technical knowledge but then they should get paid by proposal and not because they are in the top 20 .
Maybe they have expansive hosting need the extra rewards to pay for the hosting ? You see very often that some witness servers are powering down no idea why i never asked.
I know that i won't have to powerdown for hosting costs since the server is right infront of me.
It is so awesome finally having a chat with you @stresskiller
Thanks so much for creating time for meet our Hive witness. Have a wonderful day 🤝🏻
You're welcome.
NB: those were @stresskiller exact words to the interview questions. Nothing was changed.
PROMOTING AND INTERVIEWING HIVE WITNESSES IS ALL I DO
! [ Special thanks to]
@canadian-coconut @resonator @ranchorelaxo @sanjeevm @gogreenbuddy @solominer @edicted @honey-swap @fedesox @trafalgar @yeouido.park @balte @deepresearch @fw206 and everyone who has been supporting my interview. Thanks to you all.
! [ SPECIAL THANKS TO MY GUESTS]
@kyle @enginewitty @ura-soul @roelandp @vsc.network @Actifit a @thebbhproject @Stayoutoftherz @Wrestorgonline @Rishi556 @Botlord @yabamatt @seattlea @Shmoogleosukami @borislavzlatanov @atexoras.witness
As Hive users we need to do everything in our power to choose witnesses that will represent the community well. Before voting make sure you do some research on the witness you are voting for and be informed. Head over to https://wallet.hive.blog/~witnesses OR https://peakd.com/me/witnesses and click on some of the witnesses names, get to know them a bit better and do your part to make sure this community thrives.
You can read more about @stresskiller here
please vote and support @stresskiller to be your witness today!
If you appreciate and value what I do, please consider supporting me by Upvoting, Sharing and Reblogging and kindly follow for more content to come
Thanks for reading. Till next time.
You can check and read my previous interview with @kyle ♥ @enginewitty ♥ @ura-soul ♥ @roelandp ♥ @vsc.network♥ @Actifit ♥ @thebbhproject ♥ @Stayoutoftherz ♥ @Wrestorgonline ♥ @Rishi556 ♥ @Botlord ♥ @yabamatt ♥ @seattlea ♥ @Shmoogleosukami ♥ @borislavzlatanov ♥ @atexoras.witness and you can make sure you follow me to get updated with the next episode.
Help a soul today so that the world will be a better place for you and for me.
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