TimCliff Witness Update 2017-01-29

Hello Everyone!

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

• I upgraded both my witness and seed nodes to v0.16.1.
• I posted a Steemit.com GitHub Report with the latest info on the Steemit dev team's GitHub progress. This report helps the community to know what the Steemit dev team has been working on.
• I reviewed the images for the "Welcome Page" banner with Steemit, and we decided on the winning image. (Congratulations to @son-of-satire!) The image has been provided to @bitcoiner, who will be working to add it to the "Welcome to Steemit" page :-)
• I posted instructions for developers to setup and run a local instance of Steemit.com. This should hopefully help more people in the community to be able to work on changes to Steemit.com and submit pull requests!
• Unfortunately, @the.masses project has been shut down. The account had started to be use for spam/abuse, and there was not an easy way to stop it without revoking the private key. It was a very fun/interesting project though! (Details here.)
• I created the latest edition of the Reports from the Witnesses series. This report provides the community with an aggregated report of all the witness reports from the past week.
• I am starting a project to create a Steemit New User Questionnaire for users to provide feedback on the site/community. Once it is finalized, I plan to include it as a suggestion on the "Welcome Page" for new users to fill out after being on the site for 2-3 weeks.
• I thought it would be interesting to see how the witness ranks would change if witnesses were ranked by popular vote instead of SP, so I collected the data and presented it here.
• I provided an update on the Splitting Blog and Resteem into Separate Tabs bounty. Even though the official requirements of the bounty were not met, I paid @bitcoiner $30 of the $50 SBD bounty - since all the work was done (even though it was not ultimately accepted and put up on Steemit.com). (Details here.)

Forward Looking Plans:

• Looking into changes that I can make to Steemit.com and submit as pull requests.
• Continue my involvement with existing projects.

Use of Witness Funds: (No Change)

• So far I continue to run my witness servers at a slight 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. I have been able to cover the costs of my servers using author rewards from my blog posts though - which is nice!
• 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 create bounties that incentivize more Steemit.com front-end UI development.

Summary of current witness parameters:

• Price Discount: My discount remains unchanged, at 2%. The SBD peg has held close to $1.00, although it has been frequently slightly above. (Currently it is at $1.04.) The debt level is still high though, at 3.0%. Because the debt level is 'high', we should be encouraging more people to convert SBD->STEEM to reduce the debt. Given the current level of debt, a higher price discount is the preferred method over a higher SBD interest rate to maintain the SBD peg.
• Registration Fee: My registration fee has been lowered to 20 STEEM, which is approximately $3.20 (at the current market price). The change in policy is due to this recommendation from @gtg.
• SBD Interest Rate: My SBD interest rate remains unchanged, at 4%. My current policy is to only update SBD interest once a month (on the first of the month) as summarized in this post, but that is subject to change. Based on the currently high SBD peg and discussions among other witnesses, I am planning to lower my SBD interest rate to 2.5% on 2/1.

I welcome feedback on any of my projects or things that I can be doing better as a witness. If you think I am doing a great job, I would really appreciate your witness vote :-)

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!

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