It has been a busy week all round, and although updating to the latest release v0.19.11 proved tricky and required a long 6 hour replay of the blockchain - I'm happy now to see we are running the latest version of Steemd that deals with a number of small bugs from the earlier release. There are still many Witnesses yet to update, I think this might be due to the fact the old version will still resolve blocks so the sense of urgency is not there - although the release does state Witness nodes are strongly advised to update to the latest release.

Regarding the registration fee, we both agreed after reading @pfunk comment in the Witness chat that making it harder for spam accounts to be created would be a benefit - particularly I have seen the damage done in the community by the flag bot ring that has been created by abusing sign ups to register 100's of accounts that are run through a bot to simply randomly flag people - the flag itself might not take value from a post rewards, but what many fail to appreciate is how it impacts the poster receiving it. So many on here are working extremely hard to produce incredibly good blog posts, and they are proud of whatever they receive in return for that - they see a flag as disapproval of their work, it's demoralising and carries the potential to drive away the people many of us are working hard to retain here.

@enginewitty pointed out last night that @therealwolf had made an update post on this same subject, and that there was a very good argument not to change made by @yabapmatt which I have read through and can see very valid points. I'm interested now to see the perspective of other Witnesses, and I think it could make for a lively debate during next weeks WitnessChat on the SteemitRamble discord.

#thealliance #witness