Just a quick Witness update (which turned out to not be so quick!):

Steem Dollar Peg Support

I agree with the current movement to increase the Steem Dollar APR (Annual Percentage Rate) to 20%, what is currently happing on Steem is a sort of monetary policy committee meeting, whereby witnesses who agree with this motion, update their witness with the percentage they wish to see implemented on the blockchain and the community votes the witnesses whose parameters they agree with. The higher up the witness is in rank, the more effect the witness has on the global parameters of the blockchain. The top 19 however have equal effect as best as I can tell.

I have always supported a strong SBD peg to the USD, so the SBD asset can be taken seriously as a safe store of value, generally, fiat based monetary policy committees agree on a higher interest rate to stimulate demand for the currency in question, the higher the interest rate the more attractive the investment into bonds or savings in that currency will be and thus driving up the rate of exchange.

If you like the idea of earning 20% per annum on your SBD and having the peg closer to 1:1 to the USD, then vote for my witness!

Higher Priced Steem Accounts

Currently Steem's only product it can really sell is "access to the economy" in the form of new user accounts, I think Steem could have created an exclusive niche market coveted by the public if it wasn't giving away accounts with free SP loaded on it, if Facebook said here are some accounts with $10 loaded on it...come join our platform, I guess it would look kind of desperate.

If accounts were charged out at even 10$, it would bring in only serious authors who plan to write something semi-decent and stick around. I have seen from human behaviour that if you give people something for free, they don't normally appreciate it or look after it well, however if they paid for it themselves and worked for it, they treasure it more.

An extreme case would be a new website called richkids.life which made it onto mainstream media recently, largely because of it's controversial nature whereby anyone can download the app and follow its members but only those who pay the hefty monthly membership of 1000 USD (I think it was), can post content. This creates an elitist platform for "richkids" to showcase themselves and be adored by their envious fans, who hope to be like them some day.

I'm more of a community guy so the above doesn't really appeal to me, however the business model is genious, there is nothing special about the platform but it has created demand in the form of appealing to fame and esteem seekers who want to set themselves apart, be exclusive and be noticed, due to the greatly reduced competition for one.

This would be an extreme model for Steemit to follow, but I do think that if accounts were charged for and had a bitcoin or Paypal onramp to obtaining the Steem to pay for the account creation in the early stages of high post rewards and mass adoption, the purchasing of new accounts would have been a self-sustaining support to the Steem price.

Think about it, forget how Steem is now and remember back to the shiney first few months, where you could actually crowdfund something as big as a billboard on a single post _(now it would be like 10 posts or more), wouldn't you be happy to buy an account just to try it out? In those days an account price of 20$ or 50$ in Steem may even have been feasible to sell and support the Steem price further. Most people don't hesitate to pay a few Dollars to download a nice new iOS app anyway!

With the lack of a way to buy accounts on the frontend, that basically leaves the account sales to existing users, I myself tend to create new accounts from time to time for projects I think of, and don't mind paying 50 Steem for an account, call it a business license :). 50 Steem at today's prices is around 11-12$ which is what the Anonsteem service run by @someguy123 is charging. If the price of Steem goes up more, I may adjust this down a bit.

So if you want to help create demand for Steem through more expensive account creation, reduce multiple bot creation and username cybersquatting practices vote for my witness!

RPC Server in Africa

I have mentioned before that I run an RPC server in South Africa, the IP is 129.232.223.74, so if you are wanting to run any apps or scripts in Africa and are battling to connect to piston.rocks and steem.ws then you can connect to my server directly.

Please support my witness post because this 32GB dedicated beast costs around 100$ per month to fund and I pay this myself because I don't want to power down due to its publically negative connotations and the fact that it isn't widely understood that witnesses use the funds to pay for server costs from the power downs. At current Steem prices, even if I were powering down, the witness rewards at no. 41 witness wouldn't cover half of the monthly costs of all the required servers.

Thanks for your support and for being such an awesome community, I am as always, proud to be your witness!

Sincerely,

@thecryptodrive

Ok so if you read nothing above, this is the most important message:

If you think I add value to the community, please vote for my witness thecryptodrive and help me get into the top 40! I'm so close!!