Hi Steemit!
Critical Patches
Been a lot of witness related activity since my last update. We have had two critical patches 0.19.11 and now 0.19.12 both of which I have updated to within 20 minutes and 10 minutes. Both updates, fortunately, did not require a replay (4-8 hours+).
Account Creation Fee
I have changed my Steem account creation fee from 0.100 STEEM to 0.200. Keep in mind this fee is multiplied by 30 when Steem is used to create an account. At 0.100 Steem the fee would be 3 Steem (current fee) and is the consensus decides 0.200 is best it would be 6 Steem to create a new account. This puts the account creation fee around $5.22, which I feel is a reasonable number.
SBD Peg
SBD is now around $1, I say around $1 not pegged to $1. I believe SBD is still free from its peg and is only around $1 due to the decline in price for Steem. If Steem raises over $1 I believe SBD will follow a ways behind until something is done about the peg.
SBD Print Rate
You may have noticed SBD print rate is now 0%, meaning you will receive 100% Steem for your SBD liquid portion of post rewards. I wrote a detailed post about this you may find interesting to read if you want to know more.
Blacklist
I have released the first iteration of the Global Blacklist API which currently supports @buildawhale, SteemCleaners, and MinnowBooster blacklist all from one call. You can find out more about the project and how to use it here. This will allow projects and services to easily query multiple blacklists to minimize spam and abuse across all Steem related services.
Witness Participation
I am still extremely active and passionate about Steem and the community. I devote a lot of time talking with witnesses and helping out other community members. I am active in multiple witness channels and maintain three witness servers in three countries despite the fact I am far from a top 20 witness.
AppBase
My witness nodes are running Appbase 0.19.1x branch, which I believe is important as the future is Appbase and the more witnesses running it the more issues we can work out before we are 100% Appbase. Appbase branch also gives the community unlimited post/comment editing instead of just 7 days. As of right now half of the top 20 witnesses run 0.19.1x, not enough to enable the change to unlimited comment editing. There still needs to be an update to the condenser (Steemit.com front-end interface) to support this change in the UI, which I do not believe has been rolled out yet. Out of the top 20 witnesses, 32 run the Appbase branch (0.19.1x) for their producing witnesses.
I have also updated one of our full nodes to Appbase which is available immediately.
Live Curation
If you have not participated, I have been doing a weekly live curation where I give away $2-6 votes to viewers who join my Live Curation Dlive sessions. I typically have around 30-45 visitors and curate around 20+ posts live. I also spend a lot of time talking about Steem and answering questions. My latest session I got a bit emotional about the current state of the community, and suggest watching the relay to find out why. I have another one coming up really soon (tomorrow?).
Steemit Inc Faucet Abuse
I have been frequently submitting abusers to the Redeemer-Irredemables project. This project removes Steemit Inc delegation from users who break the Terms of Service (TOS) rules. The #1 offender is @camillesteemer with his Steemit Defense League. There are currently 129 accounts I have had their delegation removed and a few more in the queue for pending removal. I plan to submit a new pull request on a weekly basis to remove new accounts as they come up. While 15 SP is only enough to flag 1/10th of a cent, it has caused a lot of confusion and frustration among lower SP users.
Abuse and Anti-Spam
A large portion of my time is spent combating abuse and fraud. The recent blacklist API should allow more projects to benefit from these efforts with less effort.
Price
The current price of Steem is around $0.87. While this is discouraging, remember the entire market is in the tank and Steem is following the downward trend of Bitcoin like all alt-coins. I am confident we will see a day where we have $5 Steem and potentially even $10 Steem, it will take time though and will not happen overnight. There is a good chance Steem will go even lower, potentially to $0.80 or even lower, but there is even a better chance Steem will be much higher within the next 6 - 12 months. If you think long term, this is nothing to worry about and if you continue as if the price hasn't and continue to produce quality content and engage with the community to build new relationships, you will come out ahead in the end.
And now for something completely different
I always like to end my witness updates with something completely off the rails.
I have been watching a new show (which is strictly on YouTube) with my son that he loves. It is called Brave Wilderness and it is really good. The host has the charisma of Steve Irwin and even more fearless. He has sought out the most painful stinging creatures and purposely taken a sting from them to show people how it affects the human body and rate which are the worst. At the top of the Insect Pain Sting Index as he calls it is the Bullet Ant. You can watch the episode below, and I highly suggest you do.
Why you should vote me as witness
Witness & Administrator of four full nodes
Active, Present, Passionate
My recent popular posts
STEEM, STEEM Power, Vests, and Steem Dollars. wtf is this shit?
The truth and lies about 25% curation, why what you know is FAKE NEWS
WTF is a hardware wallet, and why should you have one?
GINABOT - The Secret to your Sanity on Steemit
How to calculate post rewards
Use SSH all the time? Time for a big boy SSH Client
How to change your recovery account
How curation rewards work and how to be a kick ass curator
Markdown 101 - How to make kick ass posts on Steemit
Work ON your business, not in your business! - How to succeed as a small business
You are not entitled to an audience, you need to earn it!
How to properly setup SSH Key Authentication - If you are logging into your server with root, you are doing it wrong!
Building a Portable Game Console
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