TimCliff Witness Update 2017-02-19

Hello Everyone!

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

• 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 submitted a pull request to the Steemit.com GitHub repository to add "guidelines for contribution" that would let users know the proper way to use (and not use) the GitHub repository to address their issues.
• I continued the discussion with the community on the proposal to create an "investor class" of users with SP over 250 MV. The intention of the proposal was to deal with the "unfair distribution" issue that has been causing a significant user retention problem. The proposal to the whales Can the community buy out a portion of your influence? was well received and created a lot of great discussion. After receiving feedback from a lot of the significant stakeholders, I published an update on the proposal summarizing where the community was at.
• Based on the conversations from the "whale buyout proposal" I determined that there were a lot of users (myself included) who questioned the value that curation rewards were bringing to the platform, and if they might be doing more harm than good. I published my views on the topic in: Elimination of Curation Rewards. Again, there was a lot of great discussion and I think it helped to talk this through and evaluate the different perspectives. @ats-david did a great job presenting the opposing view in On Curation Rewards and Their Necessity.
• Along with the other platform discussions that were going on, a lot of users (myself included) got behind the idea of changing the rewards curve from n^2 to something more linear (along the lines of n log(n)). Both @sigmajin and @clayop posted excellent posts explaining the benefits to the change and encouraging its adoption.
• I posted the details of the upcoming hardfork based on the activity in GitHub, including the tentative HF date: Latest Info on HF 17 (from GitHub) - Date Tentatively Set to Tue, 7 March 2017 16:00:00 UTC (11:00:00 EST).

Forward Looking Plans:

• I will be presenting info on Steem/Steemit and my experience as a backup witness at the next Beyond Bitcoin hangout! You can read about it here.
• I will be continuing my involvement with existing projects.
• 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!

Views on HF 17:

• There are a lot of positive changes in this HF. These changes themselves are not going to scale the platform to billions of users, but many of them will lay some of the groundwork that is intended to help get us there. There are some controversial changes as well, and some that I am not 100% behind. I have a personal policy to only oppose a HF unless I have a major objection to it though. While I have some issues with this HF - none of them are enough to make me stand in its way.
• The change to allow authors to be able to specify a number of beneficiaries to receive a percentage of the rewards opens up a lot of possibilities for users in the community to collaborate together on posts. I think this will be great for the long-term success of the platform!
• There are many changes that will make the blockchain run more efficiently and allow it to scale to more users.
• Removing the "4 post per day" soft limit has some potential risk for abuse, but I feel this is something that can be handled by the community. It makes sense for the blockchain to have a neutral position on what amount of content being posted by a single user adds value to the platform.
• The 6 reply comment limit will be removed - woo-hoo!
• The change from a 30 day and 24 hour post limit to a single 7 day one is going to be a big change for the community. There are valid arguments for and against this change. My position is that there is no way to predict how this will play out in the long term. It could go either way. It will largely be driven by user behavior and things will change a lot if/when the site scales to significantly more users than we have today.
• I am in support of the change to disable proof of work (mining) and add a 20th "top witness" position.
• Permanent editing is a great addition that I know a lot of users have been asking for. I am happy/impressed that they found a way to do this at a blockchain level that did not increase the resource requirements for running a steemd node.
• The change to create a separate rewards pool for comments is the most controversial change in this HF. This includes the elimination of curation rewards from comments, as well as a change in the comment reward formula from n^2 to n^2 / (1 + n). I have listened to the views on both sides of this argument and have considered all of the repercussions carefully. I am worried that this is going to have a negative effect on the platform, but I do also see potential for it to do good as well. I am also in support of where Steemit has indicated they want to go after this - which is to apply a similar n^2 / (1 + n) rewards formula to post rewards, as well as make changes to the curation rewards formula that is used for posts. Because I see this change as a stepping stone to changes that I feel are going to be very beneficial to the platform, I am not going to oppose it. It also could be rolled back in a future HF (in part or in full) if it does really make the situation horribly bad.
• The change to allow Steem Power delegation is going to be huge. Users with a high SP account balance will have the ability to give other users with less stake a "boost" by delegating them additional voting power. It will also allow users and third-party sites to create accounts on the blockchain without needing to actually fund the account (the account creation fee can be paid by delegated SP instead). @smooth brought up some good concerns about potential abuse with "cheap account creation", which the dev team made changes to address. With this protection in place, it is a change that will allow third-party sites to recruit new members to the blockchain in ways that they may not have been able to afford before. This has potential to open up new ways to grow the user base.
• I reserve the right to change my position, but my current plan is to accept the HF once it is released.

Use of Witness Funds:

• My witness/seed server costs are approximately $90 per month.
• At my current witness position, I am producing approximately 27 blocks per day, which is approximately 25.3 STEEM worth of SP per day. At current market prices, that is about $90 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 $0.9959.) The debt level is still high though, at 4.01%. 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 $2.38 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.