Drakos Witness Update 2018-01-28

Security Patch

Two days ago, Steemit announced a security issue that could cause a DDOS on the network servers. Fortunately, the network hasn't been impacted by the vulnerability. I promptly updated my witness, backup and seed nodes, as soon as I got word. I'd like to commend all the witnesses who were paying attention that day and who updated quickly. Those who didn't, do it soon, or your node(s) may be at risk of an attack.

Witness Parameters

• My APR is at 0%, considering the continuous high SBD price. I'm also maintaining a bias at 400%, in order to issue more SBD (increase the supply, reduce the price).
• My minimal account creation fee has been at 0.1 STEEM, as previously discussed in this post: Account Creation Fee Review
• The bandwidth limitation is still affecting all users almost every day and during certain hours. For technical RAM constraints (especially for full RPC nodes), the Top 20 witnesses had decided not to increase the maximum block size, after lengthy discussions. Therefore, I reset my value back to 65536 bytes. For now, we hope that the developers would improve the bandwidth algorithms with a code update. There's no ETA on that yet, afaik, so we wait. You can read a detailed explanation about in What is behind the Steem bandwidth issues by Hive account@jamzed.

Miscellaneous News

• My witness position dropped two points, from 30 to Rank 32 a couple of weeks ago. One of the whales who voted for me didn't like it when I removed my witness vote for him because he can't be bothered to do his witness duty and setup a proper price feed. My message to people like that, if you can't do simple witness tasks, then you shouldn't be a witness. I have already posted my position on that matter.
• I continue to help users and witnesses on Steemit.Chat.
• The https://steemian.info/witnesses page is currently missing some features that relied on SteemSQL. Unfortunately, SteemSQL is moving to a monthly subscription model. Hive account@yehey generously offered and sent me 10 SBD to pay for the subscription, the funds haven't been spent yet. However, I had contacted Hive account@arcange and we're working something out. I'll announce it when it's done. By the way, Hive account@arcange has been providing his SteemSQL service free for a long time, I think he deserves more credit for his work, give the guy a witness vote.

GitHub Pull Requests History

• Update the signup page to include periods in the allowed account characters ^{(approved ✔)}
• Indicate the Importance of Decimals and Units on Account Creation (English and French translations included) ^{(approved ✔)}
• Fixes for data too long and out of range errors
• Fix for "Unhandled rejection Error"
• Change "People I Follow" to "My Feed" ^{(approved ✔)}
• Update the signup page to include periods in the allowed account characters ^{(approved ✔)}

Together we make Steem better.