Fabien Marino

After the successful introduction of Rogier Eijkelhof as our first independent witness I am proud to present our second candidate, Fabien Marino, co-founder of Busy.org and SteemConnect. Fabien is also the author of Obyte.js (previously known as Byteball.js) the JavaScript library for Obyte. To get to know him a little better you can read the interview below:

Fabien, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? What do you do for a living?

Hi Valerius, thank you for this interview. I’m Fabien Marino, a 30 year old French living in Thailand with wife and kid. I’m working as a developer, I’ve been passionate about web development since my early age, I also regularly enjoy playing football and eating panna cotta.

Can you tell us more about your business?

Initially I’ve co-founded the project Busy.org, a social network built on top of Steem blockchain where content creators get rewards in cryptocurrency. I’ve recently step back from that project to focus on another project: SteemConnect, it’s a service for authentication that allows anyone to use Steem based apps without sharing their private keys to these apps, it’s been used by more than 600 apps including Obyte for the Steem attestor chatbot. I’m also working in my spare time on the project DrugWars, it’s an online simulation game based on Steem, they recently launched a token on Obyte.

How long have you been involved in the crypto space?

I’ve been initially working as a developer in the online advertising industry, I’ve started to be addicted about crypto with Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2015. In July 2016 I’ve discovered Steem blockchain and took this opportunity to stop my old businesses and start a new venture to create tools and applications on Steem.

What are your favorite Crypto projects?

My favorites crypto projects are Steem and Obyte, otherwise there are a few other cryptos that caught my interest like Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS or Hashgraph, but I’m not really involved in any of these.

So, how and when did you first find out about Obyte?

I heard about Obyte the first time in February 2017. It was in a Slack group for crypto enthusiasts. A reputable member was saying good things about Obyte so I decided to do my own research. At this time, I had no idea what a DAG is, when I first read the Obyte whitepaper I got fascinated by the technical design, so I decided to buy my first bytes and join the official Slack at this time.

What do you like most about Obyte?

The first thing that really got me convinced about Obyte is the DAG, the structure remove a lot of complexity from a blockchain, by design there is no blocks, so no more block time, block size, empty blocks, miners or block producers, the DAG can expand infinitely and does not rely on gatekeepers. I also like the simplicity of Obyte. There is 1 million GB and no inflation, transaction fees are predictable, each Obyte byte that you hold give you the right to publish a byte of data in the chain, smart contracts are easy to write and read.

What are your thoughts about the Witness system?

The rewards to be a witness actually don’t cover the cost of running a node. This makes the process of decentralization a bit long to take off. I believe it will not be a problem once more businesses get involved into Obyte.

Pledge

Fabien also made a pledge to run his Byteball node 24/7 and have it consistently issue new units from his witness address.

You can read the full text here or here (several copies in case a provider goes out of business).

SHA256 checksum of this PDF is c50c5ee22e90f35026e2647691796da386bf6b18a233ac486a4ddf8b52ba2546

(proof in the DAG)

Changing the witness list to include Fabien

Like what you see? Then take action now! You can edit your Obyte wallet settings to start using Fabien as a witness.

To do so, open your Obyte wallet, click on the menu icon, go to settings and under “TRUSTED NODES” click on “Witnesses”

Then flip the switch to disable auto-update from hub and click on the following address:

S7N5FE42F6ONPNDQLCF64E2MGFYKQR2I (explorer)

Replace it with Fabien’s witness address, which is:

FAB6TH7IRAVHDLK2AAWY5YBE6CEBUACF(explorer)

And you’re done :)

You can also watch this short video to see the steps in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR90E5xGLao

Doubts or praise?

Not convinced Fabien is a good candidate? Got the feeling that not enough information was shared and you have more questions before you want to make the switch? Enthusiastic? Do you like this candidate? Then we would love to hear from you as well!

Please leave your comments and questions below and we will try to address all of them to the best of our ability.

Slow but steady

I know you have all been waiting for new witness candidates for a long time but it’s not as easy as it may seem. We’re doing our best though and we expect to have another candidate much sooner this time.