I said I was coming back, and now I'm up and running. I had a few hiccups trying to get a snapshot loaded, but now the witness is replayed and functional. I am on the latest version of 1.27.6, and will likely stay there until the next major fork.

As some of you may have noticed, my witness has been down for a number of days. There was a server seizure by the police at my hosting provider, which completely took down my witness node. I decided to take matters into my own hands...

Hive has been an exceptional place for people new to crypto to get started. You don't need to KYC with shady centralized exchanges. You don't need to ape in chasing green dildos with your life savings. You just need to write interesting things on a blog, and stakeholders of the chain can reward you. For many, this is one of the lowest barriers to entry to own your own piece of the digital revolution. Blogging rewards have been instrumental in making Hive the place we all know today, and any change, including one as drastic as this, should be debated thoroughly before a consensus could develop.

I was reading @jasonliberty's post about downvotes after being tagged in the comments, and left my thoughts about fixing downvotes on the platform. I suggest reading the post yourself, as he put a lot of time and effort explaining his perspective surrounding the issue, but I also wanted to add my comment here so it got more feedback.

Today I would like to touch on the state of the current proposals. This tool has allowed us to fund many of the things we enjoy on the blockchain, without having the devs/admins make spam posts to fund it. It provides infrastructure to allow new creators to create the next generation of dapps, and documentation to lower the barrier to entry. Even with all of its faults, I am a huge fan of the system overall. But lately things are changing...