Timcliff Witness Update 2016-11-04

It's been a busy week! Here is what I've been up to since my last witness post:

• I have moved up to position 67. Thanks to everybody that has voted on me!
• I successfully witnessed 49 more blocks! I'm 54/54 now :)
• The "Welcome to Steemit" landing page for new user signups has been submitted to GitHub as a pull request! Thank's to @bitcoiner for all his hard work to turn this into a coded page and submit the pull request. You can read more about it here. This includes a link to a live demo page!
• There have been some interesting developments with @the.masses project. A Korean user created a post using the account! It was very exciting to see the project spread to another language community. Some trolls also started using the account to spread their "Steemit Sucks" propaganda, and the post was downvoted by @berniesanders. (I happen to agree with Bernie's downvote, and it is unfortunate that the account had to take such a huge reputation hit as a result of the trolls using the account.) I created a progress report on the experiment, which also includes my thoughts on Steemit flagging and censorship.
• I conducted a new Daily Steem Poll to find out what users have spent money on that they had earned through Steemit.
• I updated my witness price feed to apply the discount to the STEEM 'quote' instead of the SBD 'base'. (If this doesn't make any sense, don't worry.) Basically it is a formatting change that all the witnesses are doing to their price feeds, so that their discount can be more transparent on the steemd.com witnesses page. My price feed is currently discounted by 14%. It is my position that the witnesses should continue to discount their feeds as much as necessary to keep the SBD price pegged between 95% and 105% USD.
• I followed @klye's lead, and updated my SBD interest to 20%, and my account creation fee to 52 STEEM (info here).
• I have been very heavily involved in a lot of the discussions regarding the falling price of STEEM, the SBD/USD peg, and the SBD debt level. I created a detailed proposal on a potential solution that could be implemented by the witnesses and community to reduce the SBD debt. I also proposed a short-term "band-aid" solution that could help reduce the debt by reinvigorating promoted posts. I purposely did not make the recommendation for anyone to spend SBD promoting posts, but just asked that everyone spend a little bit of time viewing them. If the promoted posts start to get more attention again, users might see value in them and start to promote more. I have also started buying up small amounts of SBD and converting them to STEEM (most likely at a loss) to help reduce the debt level.
• I published my thoughts and recommendations on curation guilds.
• I created a very much needed (in my opinion) technical analysis of the price of Steem Power vests. With all the talk about the falling price of STEEM, a lot of people have forgotten that our long term investment vehicle is SP vests. I tracked the data of how much 1 MV has been worth from 6/19/2016-10/30/2016, and showed that it has actually gone up in value slightly from the pre-price-spike level! If you have not read the article, I highly suggest you check it out here.
• I continued to be involved with a lot of the GitHub discussions about feature additions and glitch reports.
• I submitted an updated version of the "Steemit Wish List" to the Steemit dev team in a format that they requested to more easily integrate into their back end list of feature requests.
• I made a "call to action" to all the developers in the Steemit community to help with development for the Steemit.com website. I was happy to see that a pull request has already been submitted to create a confirmation box for Resteems, and @mynameisbrian was motivated to start working on some changes of his own. I really hope to see the momentum continue to build, and we start to see a lot more of the community involved with development for the actual Steemit.com website!

Over the next week, I plan to:

• Continue involvement with many of the items listed above.
• Update my witness server and seed node to prepare for Hardfork 0.15.0.
• Monitor my witness/seed node servers before, during, and after the Hardfork.
• Create an updated "Steemit.com Development Updates" post.
• I am also working on more exciting projects and posts that I think will be add value to the community, but I don't want to share any details until I know they will be happening for sure. (Stay tuned!) :-)

If you think I'm doing a great job as witness, please vote for me here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!