TimCliff Witness Update 2017-04-02

Hello Everyone!

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

• I am continuing to work on the updates to the Steemit FAQ page with @pfunk. We are getting close to ready with the content! We are hoping to get the content to Steemit, Inc. for review soon.
• I was heavily involved in the discussions regarding HF 17/18 to try and reach consensus among the witnesses and Steemit dev team. A huge thank you to Steemit for making a compromise that all the witnesses could get behind and unanimously support!
• I posted a suggestion for people who use Poloniex to spend a few minutes monitoring the Trollbox to respond to questions/FUD about STEEM if they come up. STEEM is not mentioned very often, but it does come up occasionally. Whenever there are price spikes / dips, we should be extra vigilant during those times. Believe it or not, there are actually potential investors that hang out there, and clearing up questions and miscommunication could make the difference for whether someone decides to invest in the platform or not.
• I created a guide/review of @pharesim's SteemDice game, which includes instructions for people to play directly via wallet transfers (for people who don't trust using their keys on third-party sites).
• 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 posted a GitHub report on Steemit's latest UI release summarizing all of the changes.
• I upgraded my witness and seed nodes to support HF 18, including the 0.18.1 security patch for my witness node.
• I created an important announcement regarding SBD conversions, warning users of the potential risks of converting SBD to STEEM under current market conditions.
• I hosted a Steemit April Fools Day Contest to award $30 SBD in prizes to the best April Fools Day posts. Hopefully I didn't cause too much panic with my own prank post Steemit Witnesses Successfully Forked Blockchain and Gave All of the STEEM Coins to Themselves! A huge thanks to @arhag for a very well thought out reply that explained while this would be technically possible, it is not actually a huge risk (and gave the reasons why). It turned the prank into an educational experience for many people in the community on how DPOS can work under malicious conditions.

Upgraded Witness Infrastructure:

When I first started out as a backup witness, I had no expectations of ever becoming a top witness. It was a dream, but I never thought it would become a reality. I am still a ways away (currently ranked 25), but I am close enough that I consider becoming a top witness something that could happen at any point in time. For this reason, I have upgraded my witness infrastructure.

• I now have two powerful witness servers (a primary and a backup), plus my seed node.
• I created a modified version of @steempty's witness failover script to monitor my missed blocks and automatically switch over to my backup node if my primary one starts to fail.
• I also (finally) setup an automated script to report my price feed - something I had been doing manually every day since I first started as a witness.

I now feel prepared to support the community as a top elected witness, should the need arise. I am truly grateful to everyone that has voted on me so far, and got me all the way up to position 25! I hope to continue to earn your support through my efforts to improve the platform and community :)

Some Suggestions:

• If you are looking for a good post to share to "non technical" people encouraging them to join Steemit, check out this awesome post from @merej99!
• If you are planning to do any SBD to STEEM conversions, please read this post before starting your conversions (mentioned above).
• As everyone is probably of aware at this point, the post rewards have temporarily dropped with the implementation HF 18. This post from @abit does a great job explaining why this is happening, and answering questions about the impacts of the change.
• If you are interested in upvoting posts where the rewards will be burned for SBD debt reduction (via random post promotion), you should follow the user @pipes.
• If you are familiar with using the cli_wallet tool, this post from @abit has instructions on how to use the new author reward splitting feature introduced in HF 18. Hopefully we will see a GUI interface for this soon on Steemit.com :)

Forward Looking Plans:

• Continue my involvement with existing projects.
• Work on an updated revision of the Steem blockchain license for Steemit, Inc.
• Submit a pull request with updates to the Welcome Page.
• I am planning to attend the Beyond Bitcoin show again sometime in May as a guest speaker. I will be talking about the Steem/Steemit platform, and my work as a backup witness. I will let everyone know once I have set the date.

Summary of current witness parameters:

• Price Discount: Due to the unusually high demand for SBD, the peg has been consistently trading above $1.00. For this reason, I have stopped using a discount. In addition, due to the temporarily lower rewards caused by HF 18, I have introduced a temporary 50% premium to my bias. This will artificially increase the price of STEEM, causing more SBD rewards to be paid out during the 'filling reward pool' phase. The downside to this is that it discourages SBD->STEEM conversions, and can actually harm users who unknowingly convert during this time. I highly encourage everyone to read/share the post listed above on the dangers of SBD conversions under the current market conditions.
• SBD Interest Rate: Due to the SBD peg frequently trading above $1.00, I updated my SBD interest rate to zero on 4/1. My current policy is to only update my SBD interest rate once a month (on the first of the month) as summarized in this post, but that is subject to change.
• Registration Fee: With the new code in HF 18, it costs 30x the registration fee to create an account (info from @abit). Based on this, I have lowered my registration fee to 0.8 STEEM. This means it is approximately $4.11 to register a new account at the current market price.

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!

https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!