The first Steem witness in Africa has been live on South African "soil" since late last week, with the purpose of enhancing geo-diversity of the Steem blockchain witness node network and thereby increasing its security.

On the Steem blockchain, witnesses serve a role of validating signatures and timestamping transactions by including them in blocks. A block is any group of transactions (posts, votes, transfers, etc) which update the state of the database. -steemd.com

The Steem blockchain is like a database, but instead of being stored on a single vulnerable server location, it is distributed across computers around the world, there is no central server that can be compromised as the transactions are taken care of by the network of machines you see on the witness list.

Today with great pride, I put forward my witness application to serve the Steem community as witness.

My name is Ricardo Ferreira, family man and entrepreneur, born and raised in Durban, South Africa, witness name "thecryptodrive".

thecryptodrive witness server specifications as follows:

Intel Xeon E3-1230 3.2GHz
32 GB ECC RAM
2 x 1TB SATA HDD enterprise-class disk (RAID)
(upgradable and additional servers provisioned as required)

My background is in Marketing and Information Systems; having graduated from the University of Kwazulu Natal (UKZN) and later obtained a Digital Interactive Media Studies Diploma from Mediatek (now Vega International School of Arts Durban) among other courses and diplomas.

I was an entrepreneur from the age of thirteen, as a mobile DJ for various events and my passion is to entertain and see people have fun and enjoy themselves in everything life has to offer.

In my early twenties I started in business as co-founder of an IT support and ISP venture, Halo Communications, which was bought out in 2011. I have thus provisioned the server in the datacenter of one of our past suppliers of dedicated server and hosting infrastructure and have a good relationship with the datacenter to enable fast upgrades and troubleshooting.

After my time in the IT industry, I went on to operate an Industrial Parts Heat Treatment business. In addition to this; I have over 10 years of import/export experience; business management, legal, property sales and letting, real estate porfolio management and have sat on the board of trustees for several mixed use and commercial property bodies corporate.

I have been researching and involved with Digital Assets since mid 2015 and in June 2016 I was introduced to the Steem blockchain social media platform and have never looked back.

I started out in the early beta stage of Steemit, before payouts became real. In that time I made many friends on the platform and helped the devs by pointing out various issues that needed to be addressed. I now have my own github account as of last week and have already submitted a bug that could potentially lock users out of their accounts, if they were to rely only on the printout of the permissions keys.

Prior to this I had been serving up bugs via @jamesc, @xeroc and @roadscape who posted on Github on my behalf.

The very first bug I identified was this one, which @xeroc posted for me, where I found that the private keys were being generated all in capitals and hence did not work.

Some of you may also remember the days when we all battled to get our thumbnails to show up properly, I managed to get this double cropping issue on @roadscape's priority list and hopefully eased the frustrations of many users.

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My Current Projects on Steemit

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Steemdrive Billboard Crowdfunding Initiative

@steemdrive a global marketing initiative for marketing the Steemit platform on spectacular size outdoor media, showing the world the power of the Steemit blockchain community and how "big ticket" items such as billboards are more than possible to crowdfund and thereby providing tangible credibility of Steemit post reward payouts.

Campaign information can be seen on this link and further media exposure achieved from this campaign can be seen at:

• http://themerkle.com/steem-blogger-raises-thousands-of-dollars-to-fund-real-world-billboard-campaign/
• http://bitcoinhub.co.za/new-social-media-platform-steemit-set-to-take-south-africa-by-storm/
• https://coincheck.com/en/blog/1845

More campaign events to come soon!

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SteemSports Mass Steem Power Distribution and Gamification Project

SteemSports was born out of a community need to power up the masses of users to promote user retention through an alternate use of the platform for gamification in attempt to harness the global sports and sports betting communities, worth trillions of dollars to support the growth of Steem. This "free to play" project could very likely have its own frontend and sidechain in time, to further enhance functionality and create a niche platform while still contributing to the market cap and growth of the Steem blockchain.

Project overview available on this link.

Steemag interview can be read here.

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First RPC Node in South Africa

While trying to run the @steemsports payout script I found that I could not connect to any .ws nodes in South Africa, I believe they are only available in the USA and Europe which meant I could not run the script from my local machine and had to rent a server in Europe. This could be a hinderance for application development for Steem in Africa, so I have made contact with @jesta and I will be provisioning another 32GB RAM server this week to setup an RPC server with the help of @jesta, to add to his cluster. Future funding posts to follow.

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Steemvoter.com - Advisory Role and Site Admin

Steemvoter.com is a relatively new Steem app which empoweres users to be able to automatically vote for authors of their choice whom they wish to support, with great features such as percentage vote allocation and individual author enable/disable. This service uses only the posting key and no active key required, premium services coming soon to include user account trails and artificial intelligence bots with full statistics dashboards.

I am proud to be advisor on this project and site admin, should anyone require any assistance please contact me in steemit.chat. Thanks to Steemvoter.com, automated voting is now available to the entire community through an easy to use front-end and no longer a niche capability, together we can now empower and help each other grow!

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@dan once told me in the old Slack channel, "it's users like you that will make this platform great!", these are now words I live by everyday.

As per a previous post of mine I once again leave you with the South African term, Amandla, which comes from the Xhosa/Zulu tradition of call-and-response.

Traditionally, a crowd member declares "Amandla!" meaning "Power" and the crowd responds "Ngawethu!" adding that the power "is ours."

Vote for thecryptodrive witness and help me become a "witness for the people" and send Steem to the moon!

Sincerely,

@thecryptodrive

This is a 100% Steem Power Post! Amandla!

Well at least it was until I forgot to check the checkbox....lool! Most of you can relate, hey @cryptoiskey ;) I'll powerup anyway!

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Major Witness Campaign Supporters

@lovekimberleigh, loving wife and mother to a beautiful son and daughter whom we love very much.

Thanks for your patience and support while I have been running the various Steem campaigns. It's wonderful to finally have you taking part, I know it's not easy in the beginning when you start out, but you have grasped the post editing well and they look amazing. Lots of love and keep Steeming!

@delegate.lafona and @someguy123 for being the first to vote me and sending me straight to number 66 in a few minutes.

@complexring for being selfless and giving up @smooths 30'th vote so I could receive it, that takes a special person to do that, thank you @complexring this is exactly @ned's vision for a mutual aid community, Namaste! Anyone with free witness votes please give some to @complexring for his wonderful community spirit.

@berniesanders, @pharesim, @summon, @liondani, @cass and @charlieshrem for your influential votes!

@smooth for your friendship and guidance!

To my @steemsports and @steemdrive writers and editors team, you guys are amazing... more power to you! Let's kick Steemit up a notch shall we!?

@fuzzyvest for your great Beyond Bitcoin community and your friendship.

Thank you to the Steemit community for your support and votes! Vote thecryptodrive witness! Together we can all win!