Artwork on the buildings in Santana Row, California. (Photo by me.)
Been a while since my last update due to school and personal reasons, but with the upcoming hardfork 15, the new changes to the economy being proposed, and quickly coded, I felt now was a good time to weigh in on the past few weeks. Although I haven't been commenting or posting here much, I have been active in steemit.chat as well as discussions with witnesses and other parties!
1. Accomplished the past weeks:
- SBD Price Feed: Along with the suggestions by
and others, I have upped my vote for the interest rate of SBD to 15%. This will hopefully garner more confidence in SBD and help maintain the peg. I am currently maintaining my price feed (conversion) bias at 13% for now, but this will have to be re-evaluated shortly with the upcoming changes. Along with many other people converting to reduce the SBD debt, I converted about 2,000 SBD at a loss these last weeks. This showed me that the bias is still necessary.
- I still watch
as much as possible. It's becoming clear to me that despite changes in messages, the community perception of her has not and will likely not change. It has never been a 'plagiarism bot', but unfortunately this connotation remains. I made a comment about this recently, which I think is worth a read:
In regards to cheetah being a "post killer", it does have a certain connotation when the comment is seen. However I have also noticed most readers are smart enough to realize when cheetah is being a bit redundant, and I see plenty of posts where cheetah is ignored because readers are smart! (and thinking that readers are too dumb to make their own decision on voting for a post is kinda presumptuous...)
However, there's also some bias that goes into this. In general, we have gotten the steemit community to realize that copy-pasting is not really adding value. As such, posts that contain a large fraction of copy-paste compared to original work, tend to do poorly naturally, whether or not cheetah made a comment.
- As usual, I participated as a
member. Note that the payouts for last week are delayed, but rest assured, everything is still counted and we will be issuing two weeks worth soon.
- I upgraded my witness to the bugfix hardfork, steem v0.15.0.
2. Upcoming projects/goals:
- The biggest upcoming thing is STEEMFEST! I can't wait to meet people there. My flight is in two days, and I can't be more excited!
- Right after Steemfest I will be attending another conference, Supercomputing. So I will likely be busy for while, but I promise I'm still alive. :)
- I need to spend some time with my dev work -- one major thing to do is teach
3. Thoughts from the past weeks:
With all the massive changes being discussed to the overhauling the steemit economy, I feel like now is a good time for me to weigh in. In general, I think the changes are extremely positive to improve the overall economy. Let me break it into ideas and my thoughts:
- Changing the power down rate to 3 months (as opposed to 2 years): This is an extremely positive change that I could not be more happy about. One of my major concerns about the network is the fact that many large stakeholders were selling large quantities of steem without removing their status as the largest stakeholders. We need the ability to perform wealth redistribution. Yes, this may cause waves in the price, but the final outcome will be worth it in my mind: the constant sell pressure under the current system has not redistributed wealth. We still have the exact same set of large stakeholders.
- Reduction of inflation: Also positive. Making the regular steem token into a viable currency in itself is much better than having it as an onboarding mechanism.
- Increase of back up and mining witness pay: I'm a bit mixed on this change -- the back up pay I can agree with for sure, but the mining pay I am still concerned about. If/when the POW moves to equihash, I will reconsider how I feel about this.
- Reduction of witness pay: In my mind, this is intended to restructure the system such that witnesses are more being paid for the block production duties, rather than as 'employees of the steem blockchain' which is what I currently see them as. This change devalues the role of a witness, in a way. I have mixed feelings on this, as I know some witnesses are only after the profit, but on the other hand, a large amount are focusing really hard on improving the platform. My funding for
- Price feed / conversion from 7 days to 3.5 days: Sure, why not! The math doesn't change much, but this gives some more confidence to converters.
All in all, the changes are quite positive, but they are coming quite quick. Lets not get ahead of ourselves! There is some excellent discussion in the comment sections of the posts ( 
Okay, enough about economic changes. I want to jump in with some thoughts about the epidemic of 'vote monetization' that I fear is soon to come. I might have to make a full post about this, but I'll chime in the big idea first. So, I define vote monetization as a form of "if you vote for this, you will/can be rewarded". This is currently being done with sports, poker, lotteries, etc. In my mind, this is a slippery slope, where people realize "hey, I could set up one of these, make HUGE profits, and only pay people part of the liquid steem I generate." We had a bot epidemic, a copy-paste epidemic, and I think this is next.
HOWEVER, I don't necessary think the idea in itself is bad. I think the ad-hoc approach is currently the problem. I would be much more interested to see these events and games be implemented as smart contracts on the steem blockchain, with the removal of the high reward going into the 'trusted' account, and the outcome being programically guaranteed rather than based on trust of the user. It would be an interesting setup, to code games people can play on the network.
4. Plans/usage of witness funding:
100% of my power down each week has been sent to
In recent witness events, I wanted to point out this week that witness @abit converted $300,000 SBD, likely at a loss. That was a huge chunk of debt to the steem economy, and I just want to point out how awesome that is -- this is what witnesses should be about, making decisions in the best interest of the group and platform. Thank you 