TimCliff Witness Update 2016-12-11

Hello Everyone!

It has been a little bit of a quieter week for me. @artist1989 and I have been celebrating our wedding anniversary, which you can read about here :)

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

• I created a $50 SBD bounty for the creation of a "Welcome to Steemit" banner image, which @bitcoiner and I plan to use to make the official Welcome to Steemit landing page look pretty!
• With all of the new users that we have been getting from "pizzagate" and related "fake news" controversies seeming that Steemit offers a censorship free blockchain to post content, I thought it would be important to remind people that Only Text is Saved on the Blockchain.
• @the.masses has continued to resteem a lot. The account has also created three new posts, and continues to post a lot of comments. The reputation of the account remains unchanged, at 49.
• I created the latest edition of the Reports from the Witnesses series, with a summary of what all the witnesses have been up to.
• After the hardfork was over, I published the list of witnesses that had upgraded to v0-16-0.
• I did a "Name in Lights" post for @merej99!
• I created a post about the centralization of power on Steemit, and how @dantheman had made a comment indicating that this is an issue they are working on. The phrase he used (which I find quite exciting!) was "Big things to come".
• I created a post notifying users that there is a glitch where if you create a post using 5 tags, users will not be able to see the post when they browse the 4 secondary tags. Users can only use up to 4 tags (rather than 5) if they want the post to show up for users that are browsing the secondary tags.
• I continued to be involved with a lot of the GitHub discussions about feature additions and glitch reports.
• Updates to some of my witness parameters (details below).

Over the next week, I plan to:

• Continue my involvement with existing projects.
• Most of my time will be spent working with @bitcoiner on GitHub issues 723 and 768 for updates to the "Welcome to Steemit" page.

Use of Witness Funds:

• So far, I am continuing to run my witness servers at a loss - which is totally fine by me. I believe it is important for witnesses to be doing what they do for the community, and not to make money.
• I have been withdrawing enough SBD from my author reward payouts to cover the costs of running my servers.
• If the amount I make from my witness position exceeds the costs of running my servers, I plan to use a majority of my witness funds to create bounties that incentivize Steemit.com front-end UI development.

Summary of current witness parameters:

• Price Discount: I am keeping my price discount at 5%. The SBD peg is currently slightly less that $1.00, at 0.993 - which is a good place to be. The debt level has started to get high again though. It is currently at 2.8%. I feel that we need to be encouraging more people to convert SBD->STEEM right now to reduce the debt.
• Registration Fee: I still have my registration fee set to 50 STEEM, which is approximately $9.50 USD worth of SP (at the current market price). This is on the high side, although it does provide an extra incentive for new users to sign up. If the price of STEEM starts to go back up again, I will likely reduce this to around $5.00 USD worth of STEEM.
• SBD Interest Rate: I am keeping this at 7%. Based on the fact that the SBD debt is still considered 'high', an increased discount is the preferred method over SBD interest rate in terms of keeping the SBD/USD peg close to $1 USD. Ideally the interest rate should probably be at around 2-3% right now (with a higher discount in place to help keep the peg close to $1 USD), but due to the way SBD interest is paid - it is not advised to reduce the rate drastically over a short period of time. If the conditions continue similar to what they are today, I plan to slowly reduce this to my 2-3% target over the next 3 months.

I welcome feedback on any of my projects or things that I can be doing better as a witness :-)

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!

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