Drakos Witness Update 2017-09-03

Witness News

Rank

I'm very excited to announce that I'm in the Top 50 with 223 votes.
My witness position had a nifty bump this week to Rank 47, thanks to Hive account@clayop's vote shuffle. Many other witnesses had their position move significantly too. Right now I'm at Rank 48 because Hive account@clayop did another shuffle few days ago. Hopefully one day I'll reach the Top 20 thanks to your continuous support. Until then, small steps.

Steem Update

This week the 0.19.2 update (Steem Equality) was released.
https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases/tag/v0.19.2

It is a soft release that addresses miscellaneous bug fixes and enhancements, in particular an improvement to the P2P network stability. Also, the docker deployment and documentation were updated to make deploying a new Steem node faster and easier.

I started updating my servers as soon as it was announced (thanks Hive account@followbtcnews and Hive account@timcliff for notifying us about it). I had to rebuild manually since the updated Steem-in-a-box wasn't ready until the next day. Everything went smoothly, 0.19.2 was rolled out on each of my servers (primary witness, backup witness and seed) within 12h (I needed to sleep you know). The process went well with zero downtime and without missing any blocks.

SBD APR

I did some chart analysis on the SBD price. Although Poloniex may lower the average price on the markets to $0.95, the volume traded there is actually much lower than on Bittrex, where the price has been pretty close to $1 since mid-July, albeit with some interesting daily swings (look at what happened on 22 August). Poloniex troublesome deposits/withdrawals have affected the SBD price dramatically in August, where the price dipped to $0.65! It's been slowly regaining in the past weeks; today it's around $0.97.

SBD Price on Bittrex

SBD Price on Poloniex

In light of these developments, I lowered my APR from 5% to 1%.

Bittrex had a few hours SBD/STEEM wallet maintenance this week (when I checked at least); they still provide a more reliable trading exchange than Poloniex. SBD/STEEM deposits/withdrawals remain disabled on Poloniex since my last three weekly witness updates.

Miscellaneous

• I continue to support new users in the help channel on Steemit.Chat, and I also support new witnesses with their setups when they need it.
• I launched my second art contest, Drakos Art Contest: Pirate Wench Theme, check it out and resteem it if you have artists among your followers. I'm testing the grounds for a new artists community, I hope to find enough curators and patrons to kick it off.
• Hive account@bilalhaider the flooder has struck again on the Steemit.Chat, after one month of calm. The usual cat and mouse game ensued, he flooded the chat with profanities, while me and a couple other moderators tried to clean his mess. He came back the next day too, but this time I encouraged the chatters to participate in fending him off. It was a success.
• Game of Thrones season ended last Sunday, now I need to patiently wait for the next season in 2019 😞😞😞

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_{Proud member and delegator of the Hive account@minnowsupport project.
Join us on https://discord.gg/GpHEEhV}

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Available & Reliable. I am your Witness. I want to represent You.

🗳 If you like what I do, consider voting for me 🗳

Thank you for your support.

If you never voted before, I wrote a detailed guide about Voting for Witnesses.

_{Go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Enter my name in the voting textbox and press VOTE once.}

Alternatively,

_{with cli_wallet : vote_for_witness "YOURACCOUNT" "drakos" true true
with steem-python: steempy approvewitness drakos --account YOURACCOUNT}