TimCliff Witness Update 2017-02-12

Hello Everyone!

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

• There is a user @blacklist that is adding random users to a downvote list and demanding a 40 STEEM ransom to be removed. Please read this post from @schattenjaeger, to familiarize yourself with the scam - so you can educate other users if you see it happening.
• A pull request was submitted by @bitcoiner to add the banner from @son-of-satire, as well as a table of contents to the "Welcome Page". You can read about it in @bitcoiner's post 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 have been very actively involved in the discussion on @snowflake's proposal to give dolphins and minnows more influence in the site by removing curation rewards, and using the money to pay whales to be a part of an "investor/moderator" class that only uses a limited amount of their voting power for upvoting posts. I think that this proposal has the potential to resolve some of Steemit's biggest user retention issues by giving more influence/power to "regular users". You can read about the proposal in this post.
• I continued working on updates to the Steemit FAQ page with @pfunk. I submitted an initial pull request to get feedback on the structure/design to be used to scale the FAQ to a large amount of content.

Forward Looking Plans:

• My main focus over the next few weeks continues to be working on updates to the Steemit FAQ page with @pfunk. A huge thank-you to @shenanigator for assembling a majority of the content!
• I am working with the Steemit dev team to create "Guidelines for submitting GitHub issues" for the Steemit GitHub repo, which will show up when users try to create new issues in GitHub.
• I will be continuing my involvement with existing projects.

Use of Witness Funds:

• My witness/seed server costs are approximately $90 per month.
• At my current witness position, I am producing approximately 24 blocks per day, which is approximately 22.5 STEEM worth of SP per day. At current market prices, that is about $97 worth of SP per month.
• I have never powered down (and do not plan to for the foreseeable future), so I am continuing to pay for my witness expenses out of my author rewards for now.

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 $0.9945.) The debt level is still high though, at 3.34%. Because the debt level is 'high', the price discount is intended to encourage more people to convert SBD->STEEM (to help reduce the debt).
• Registration Fee: My registration remains unchanged at 20 STEEM. This is approximately $2.90 at the current market price.
• SBD Interest Rate: My SBD interest rate remains unchanged at 2.5%. 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. 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.

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!

---

Remember to vote for witnesses!
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you aren't sure who to vote for, check out this Witness Voting Guide.