TimCliff Witness Update 2018-07-26

Hello Everyone!

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

• I submitted two pull requests for SBD changes to be included in hardfork 20. Both pull requests have been accepted and merged into the official repository! Details here and here.
• I applied the 19.5 security patch to all my nodes.
• I continued testing the AppBase release candidate.
• I updated my primary witness node to the 19.10 (AppBase) release.
• I am working on getting my appbasetest.timcliff.com RPC node to work with the RocksDB version of account history.
• A lot of my time continues to go towards helping users who are reporting issues in the steem.chat "help" channel.
• I continue to spend a lot of time discussing potential changes and issues/concerns with stakeholders and users, in order to try and find the best ways to advance the platform and community forward.
• I continue to post the weekly Reports from the Witnesses series each week, which provides the community with an aggregated report of all the witness reports from the week.
• I participated in the MSP Steem Witness Forum hosted by @aggroed.
• I did an interview with @littlescribe (here) as well as a 'debate' with @sircork (here).
• I started a discussion on what needs to happen for STEEM to reach $10 in 2018.
• I collected a list of websites/businesses/services accepting STEEM/SBD as payment (here). I plan to publish the data soon.
• I reviewed the public lists of Steem seed nodes and submitted updates to the official Steem repository as well as the "seed status" website created by @wackou. Details here.
• I'm starting a new Interview a Stakeholder series to try and give community members a better idea of what the views of stakeholders are.
• I setup a local condenser instance to support unlimited content editing. Details here.
• I opened several issues with suggested improvements and reported bugs. Devportal: 242, 269, 270. Redeemer: 24. Condenser: 2920, 2927, 2959. Steem: 2569, 2586, 2592.
• I helped to review a pull request from @guiltyparties to make several updates to the condenser/steemit.com "Welcome Page."
• I submitted a pull request to make several updates to the condenser/steemit.com FAQ. The changes include: adding information on Vessel (the desktop wallet developed by @jesta), clarifying the amount of time it takes for accounts to be approved, clarifying the stolen account recovery process, and updating the list of exchanges to include the new exchanges that Steem has been listed on.

Forward Looking Plans:

• I will continue to provide support in the help channel of steem.chat.
• I will continue writing the weekly "Reports of the Witnesses" series.
• I will be conducting my new "Interview a Stakeholder" series with several of the large Steem stakeholders.
• I plan to post a "lessons learned" article about my experience developing two hardfork changes for the Steem blockchain.
• I am discussing a few potential code changes to make to the Steem blockchain with stakeholders and the Steemit development team.
• I have a few other projects in the works, but I will wait to share more details until they are further along. (Stay tuned.)

Information / Suggestions / News:

• STEEM has been added to quite a few new exchanges. You can find the list here.
• Finally Comments is a new embedded comments system powered by Steem.
• Let's Eat is a new decentralized restaurant review application run on the Steem blockchain.
• QuickSteem is a new application to create new Steem accounts on the blockchain.
• Steemwhale.io is a fun new project from @roelandp.
• Check out the new oracle-d project that is working on bringing new investment to Steem.
• Steemit, Inc. has posted quite a few updates. You can read them here: @steemitblog.
• Have you claimed your free Byteball tokens from the airdrop yet? If not, there are instructions here.
• SteemFest^3 is scheduled for November 7-11 in Kraków, Poland. Details here.

Summary of Current Witness Parameters:

• SBD Interest Rate: SBD is still trading above $1.00. Based on this, my interest rate is currently set to 0.
• Price Feed Bias: My price feed bias is also set to 0. I am not currently planning to use the bias to increase SBD production, because I feel the potential negative consequences outweigh the potential gains.
• Registration Fee: My registration fee is currently set to 0.1 STEEM. This makes it so that a new account costs 3 STEEM (non-delegated), which is about $4.50 USD at current market prices. Users who have accounts created with the minimum fee (3 STEEM) and are not delegated extra SP are likely to run into bandwidth limitations. It is recommended that new accounts start out with at least 15 SP.
• Maximum Block Size: I currently have my block size set to 65,536. I feel this is sufficient given the current size of the user base and the amount of daily usage we have.

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!

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!