<center><img style="width: 175px; height: 235px;" alt=""
src="http://i.imgur.com/J73XnSN.jpg"><img
style="width: 624px; height: 214px;" alt=""
src="http://i.imgur.com/qKBcEgI.png"><br><em>A Curation Trail Witness</em></center><hr><center><h2><em>Hello Steemians</em></h2></center><br></em>

<h3>Are you ready for Hardfork 19 ? </h3>Flatter rewards curves, less large account influence, a level playing field for all Steemians ? Well at least that's what they tell us, we don't pretend to understand it all but we have upgraded the node to HF-19 as of Jun 1st 2017

<h3>What this will mean for Curation  Trails</h3>It appears we are going to have to lower our voting power if we wish to continue to support as many Steemians as possible. Hopefully our ability to reward our supporters will be increased to make up for the lower vote weight. But that remains to be seen.

According to <a href="http://steemstory.com/"><strong>Steem Story</strong></a> this account has averaged 50 votes per day, every day since it's creation. We may have to reduce this as well but that remains to be seen. We will continue to do our very best to support our supporters and earn curation rewards for our followers. This statement applies to all three of our curation trails. @majes , @idnit , and @christian-trail

<h3>Why you should support Backup Witnesses & how to find them</h3>Backup Witnesses play a vital role in the decentralization of the Steem Blockchain. Witnesses are ranked by the total weight of the votes they receive. As of HF-18 there are 20 top ranked witnesses and 1 backup witness that produce a block every 3 seconds.

Top 20 witnesses receive approximately 1/2 steem power per block produced. Backup witness receive approximately 1 steem power for every block produced. Depending on rank backup witnesses average from 1 to 65 steem power per day while top 20 witnesses average 10 steem power per minute ... 

However, these top 20 witnesses also provide many of the tools we all love to use; provide seed nodes we need for the blockchain to run smoothly; and generally have much more powerful servers than us lowly backup witnesses.

You can find a list of the top 100 witnesses using one of these such tools at <a href="https://steemd.com/witnesses"><strong>steemd</strong></a>. Here you can see vital information about each witness. What version of the blockchain they are running, what price they are reporting and how old it is, and also any bias they may have set for SBD as well as interest % paid by the blockchain.

Every Steemian has 30 witness votes, please use them and consider supporting a few backup witnesses along with your favorite top 20. We very much appreciate your support !!<h3><em>Keep Steemin...</em></h3>
<center><a href="https://steemit.com/~witnesses"><img
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src="https://i.imgsafe.org/4892db5f2c.png"></a></center>