TimCliff Witness Update 2017-07-20

Hello Everyone!

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

• I hosted the Minneapolis / St. Paul meetup in the Twin Cities, and it was a lot of fun! You can check out the details of the event here.
• I am running a marketing campaign 10,000 Flyers to try and get the community to hang up 10,000 flyers by the end of the month. Everyone in the community can help participate. Details on how to participate can be found in this post.
• I posted my reactions to HF 19.
• I posted a tutorial showing how it is OK for minnows to vote 40 times per day, even without the vote slider.
• I have been involved in the discussions and support for the bandwidth issues that many minnows were reporting. I delegated SP to a lot of users that had insufficient bandwidth, and increased my block size to 131,072, to double the network's bandwidth. When it was discovered that there was an overflow glitch in the bandwidth formula, I switched back to 65,536, since this was determined to be the best setting to minimize the impact of the glitch. As soon as the dev team released a fix as softfork 19.1, I upgraded my primary and backup nodes to 19.1 to apply the fix. I still have my standby node running 19.0, just in case there is a need to rollback.
• I was a guest on the SteemitTalk Podcast show.
• I have been spending a lot of time helping users in the steemit.chat "help" channel with various issues, mostly related to account creation and bandwidth limitations.
• I continue to review and respond to issues in the steem and condenser GitHub repositories.
• 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 continuing to fund @moataz's Facebook advertising campaign to bring more people to Steemit. So far, we have received 6,000 clicks, reaching 67,000 people and generating over 270,000 impressions. More details about the campaign are here.
• I created a guide of tips for new users.
• I submitted a pull request to update the FAQ page.
• I submitted a pull request to make the 'Buy' links in the wallet pre-populate the account name in BlockTrades with your username.
• I submitted a pull request to update the vote slider to include delegated SP when determining whether or not to display the slider.

Forward Looking Plans:

• Continue spreading the word on the 10,000 Flyers marketing campaign.
• I'm still working on a few different condenser pull requests in the background. Details will be shared if/when I am able to successfully make the changes.
• 'Deep dive' review of the HF 20 proposal.
• Continue my involvement with existing projects.

Some Information / Suggestions:

• Steemit announced the first official crowdsourced marketing project Steem Park, which launched this past weekend.
• Please help with the 10,000 Flyers marketing campaign by hanging up a few flyers in your local area :) Details are in the post.

Summary of Current Witness Parameters:

• SBD Interest Rate: The price of SBD has been fluctuating a lot recently. We are coming out of a fairly prolonged period of over-priced SBD, and it is currently at $1.06. It has gone down below $0.90recently, but only for a short time. I am evaluating whether a small amount of interest would be beneficial to maintain the peg, but currently I do not see that it is necessary. I continue to monitor the market conditions carefully, and plan to add a 1-3% interest if there starts to be a more medium/long term trend of the price staying below the peg.
• Price Discount: Due to the SBD peg consistently trading above $1.00, I still have zero discount on my price feed. If action is needed to support the peg, my current plan is to use APR/interest instead of a price feed bias, because the SBD debt level is not considered high.
• Registration Fee: My registration fee is set to 0.20 STEEM. This would be approximately $8.10 to register a new account without delegation at the current market price, or $0.27 plus $39.83 of delegated SP for a delegated account. I would prefer to have it even less than this, so that non-delegated accounts were in the $3-5 range, but it has been pointed out that users with less than 5-6 SP are likely to run into bandwidth limitations. Therefore, 0.20 STEEM is as low as I can go without risking new users being unable to use their accounts.
• Maximum Block Size: I currently have my block size set to 65,536, which is the consensus among the top witnesses. If bandwidth limits start to become an issue again due to increased network usage, I will re-evaluate, but for now 65,536 seems to be working.

I welcome feedback if you think there are 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!