TimCliff Witness Update 2017-04-17

Hello Everyone!

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

@pfunk and I finalized the updates to the FAQ page and sent them to Mitchell ( @zurvanic) (from Steemit, Inc.) to review. Mitchell sent us a small list of revisions to make, which I will be putting into the final draft this week. I plan to have the pull request submitted with all of the changes by the end of the week!
I submitted two pull requests. One to the condenser (Steemit.com) repository for some updates to the Welcome Page. The other updated a comment in the Steem blockchain code that described how many witnesses were required to hardfork, since the number of 'top witnesses' changed from 19 to 20 in hardfork 18.
I posted a proposal to update the Steem Power logic to allow faster power downs if users opted to burn a portion of their STEEM for higher liquidity. (Post here.) The user @drunk replied with a very useful comment about how the slow withdrawal schedule of SP is a good safety mechanism in case someone's account is compromised. This will be an important thing to keep in mind if we ever decide to change the power down rules.
I posted a reminder for users to help respond to questions and clear up misinformation in the Poloniex trollbox during the weekend price spike, where a lot of discussions were happening about STEEM. (Post here.)
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.

Forward Looking Plans:

Submit the pull request with the updates to the FAQ page.
Continue my involvement with existing projects.
Work on an updated revision of the Steem blockchain license for Steemit, Inc.
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.

Some Suggestions:

If you are planning to do any SBD to STEEM conversions, please read this post before starting your conversions.
If you are interested in learning how to use the new "Delegated Steem Power" feature, check out this post from @liberosist. Note - the feature is currently only supported via programmatic interfaces, such as cli_wallet.
If you haven't seen it already, check out the Hardfork 19 Proposal from @steemitblog!
If you have a few moments to spare, remember to check out the Poloniex trollbox (especially during price spikes) to help get the word out about STEEM!

Summary of Current Witness Parameters:

SBD Interest Rate: Due to the SBD peg frequently trading above $1.00, I updated my SBD interest rate to zero on April 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. I highly encourage other witnesses to set their APR to 0% until the SBD peg returns to normal. If it does return to normal with a 0% interest rate, we can re-evaluate whether SBD interest is needed to maintain the peg.
Price Discount: Due to the high demand for SBD, as well as the artificially reduced supply caused by the HF 18 rewards pool change, the peg has been consistently trading above $1.00. For this reason, I have introduced a temporary 100% 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 (which help reduce the debt), and it 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.
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, my registration fee is set to 0.8 STEEM. This means it is approximately $5.66 to register a new account at the current market price. I will likely be lowering this to .5 STEEM if the recent price increase holds.

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!

Basically if you look at the current slider at 100% and how fast that burns through your voting power, it sounds like they are enabling essentially turning that up to 400%. So it'd use more of your steem power, but burn through your voting % faster. This is cool for giving some posts higher payouts and making it so people with low steem power might be able to give a few pennies worth of reward. It does however, seem like a way you could consolidate power in certain posts AGAIN. So a post that benefits specific entities that could only get 100% from each person before could now potentially get 400% from all of those people. That seems like a backwards step from some of the goals of the 7 day payouts, etc. Then again with the change to the reward curve it may not matter.