TimCliff Witness Update 2016-12-03

Hello Everyone!

Here is what I've been up to since my last witness post:

• My witness node has been upgraded for hardfork 16, and everything is running smoothly.
• My seed node is being upgraded tonight, and should be completed within the next few hours.
• I have spent a lot of time discussing the appropriate price discount and SBD APR rates with @clayop, @smooth, @bacchist. This is a very important issue for witnesses, as the choices that we make regarding these parameters have a big impact on the SBD to USD peg, SBD debt level, and cost of SBD conversions to stakeholders.
• Based on my discussions, I posted a Witness Parameters Guide with info on the SBD debt level and conversion rates - to help clarify the rules in the White Paper that became confusing after the "black swan prevention" changes were put in place. @smooth posted another great/informative post on the topic here. @clayop posted on the topic (here) as well.
• @the.masses has continued to resteem a lot. The account has also created several posts as well, and continues to post a lot of comments. The reputation of the account is up to 49 now, which is reflective of the fact that the account has been contributing a lot of valuable posts/comments, and has not been doing any significant 'trolling'.
• I created the latest edition of the Reports from the Witnesses series, with a summary of what all the witnesses have been up to.
• I created a new Steemit Profile Page for my account, to demonstrate a way that users can use the new 'website' feature of the Steemit profile page if they don't have an actual website.
• I posted an updated Steemit.com Development GitHub Issue Report to summarize what the Steemit dev team has been up to!
• I continued to be involved with a lot of the GitHub discussions about feature additions and glitch reports.
• Updates to some of my witness parameters (details below).

Over the next week, I plan to:

• Continue my involvement with existing projects.
• I continue to work on more projects in the background, but I don't like to share details until they are ready. (Stay tuned!) :-)

Use of Witness Funds:

• So far, I am continuing to run my witness servers at a loss - which is totally fine by me. I believe it is important for witnesses to be doing what they do for the community, and not to make money.
• If the amount I make from my witness position exceeds the costs of running my servers, I plan to use a majority of my witness funds to cover additional bounties to incentivize Steemit.com front-end UI development.
• I have been withdrawing enough SBD from my author reward payouts to cover the costs of running my servers.

Summary of current witness parameters:

• Price Discount: I lowered my discount from my previous value of 8% to 5%. This is based on recommendations from @clayop, @bacchist, and @smooth. Due to the rising price of STEEM, a discount in order for users to receive approximately one USD worth of STEEM is not necessary. (Most users are currently receiving more than 1 USD worth of STEEM from their conversions.) Also, after the hardfork - conversions will take 3.5 days (instead of 7), so the risk of conversions will be significantly lower. I am still leaving some discount in place though, because I believe that the amount of SBD debt is still high - and I feel that this is a good time to be encouraging more people to convert SBD->STEEM to reduce the debt.
• Registration Fee: I currently have my registration fee set to 50 STEEM, which is approximately $8.00 USD worth of SP (at the current market price). This is probably a little on the high side, although it does provide a little extra incentive for new users to sign up. If the price of STEEM continues to go up, I will likely reduce this to around $5.00 USD worth of STEEM.
• SBD Interest Rate: I reduced this from 12% down to 7%. The SBD to USD peg seems to be remaining fairly stable (slightly above $1 USD), so a slow and steady reduction is what is advised. 7% is slightly below the current median of the top 19 witnesses. Based on the fact that the SBD debt is still considered 'high', an increased discount is the preferred method over SBD interest rate in terms of keeping the SBD/USD peg close to $1 USD.

I welcome feedback on any of my projects or things that I can be doing better as a witness :-)

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!

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