Anyx, Cheetah, and Steemcleaners; witness update - 06-12-2016

Steemfest!	Supercomputing Conference!

    Phew, conferences! If for some reason you didn't hear about it, SteemFest, hosted in Amsterdam, was a few weeks ago. What an amazing time! It was incredible to put faces to usernames, and meet a lot of the people I've been interacting with online for so long. After SteemFest, I traveled straight to another conference, Supercomputing, in Salt Lake City. There I presented a recent publication of mine, which was fun too.. but not nearly as good as SteemFest! :)

Anyways, I figured I'd do a full update today, since it's been a while. Happy hardfork day~

1. Accomplished the past few weeks:

1. Since I wasn't around much during the conferences, I followed Hive account@smooth's SBD interest rate and discount monetary policies directly.
2. Participated as a Hive account@steemcleaners member as often as I could to help fight fraud and abuse on the platform.
3. Upgraded flawlessly to HardFork 16, which went live today.
   • Witness upgraded without missing any blocks!
   • Hive account@cheetah and Hive account@seraph bots both upgraded fine, as well as my voting bot, and price feed.
4. Added the first bit of functionality of Hive account@cheetah to Golos, the blacklist, for spammers and serial abusers. I have given control of her to Hive account@aleksandraz there, who is heading the steemcleaners parallel initiative, kulturagolosa, on their network.

2. Upcoming projects/goals:

1. I will need to figure out how to restructure Hive account@steemcleaners, which I will discuss more below.
2. I plan to port Hive account@cheetah's content detection over to Golos, next. Hopefully I will also be able to sync the two in a way to easily check for cross-platform plagiarism as well.

3. Thoughts from the past few weeks:

    Hard fork 16 is now live! This is a huge change to the steem inflation strategy, as well as rewards. What this also means that going forward, is that "witness funding for projects" has essentially been cut, unless the price of steem rises dramatically. Overall, I think the economic changes are good; however, without any new method to fund projects, I fear the abandonment of previous witness projects/support.

    What this means for Hive account@steemcleaners: It is unclear to me how long we will be able to offer rewards. Without "witness project" support, we have about one more month at most, at which point and time the project will simply become voluntary only. Lately, our manpower has been dwindling -- we have not even had time to compile and post weekly logs. Payouts are still being issued though, for now. If the price of steem drops further, Hive account@cheetah may also have to be abandoned (or otherwise need to be monetized/run by donation to keep her alive). I have often considered removing features of Hive account@cheetah due to community backlash, so they might end up getting their wish soon enough!

    Lastly, a month ago I made a comment about the 'vote betting/monetization', as follows:

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.

    As it turns out, Hive account@dan is starting to think about this (see this post here), so I hope that such as system does get built into the chain. More importantly in my mind however, is the separation of content to be easily accessible; 'link sharing' should only be for curation rewards and not author rewards, and in a separate interface, 'blogging' should be in a separate interface, and 'games' should also. Will this happen? Who knows, but it's something I'd certainly like to see.