Ausbitbank Witness Update 22/5/17

Another solid week of price and user growth ! This is what I've been up to this week :

I've climbed position to backup witness #48 !

A few days after my last witness update, I gained some more support and now I've finally cracked the top 50 witness list.

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Now my account is even easier to vote for at https://steemit.com/~witnesses . Progress!

Witness node operations

My witness node has been running steady, but unfortunately I missed a single block over the last week bringing my total misses to 3 ever.

I also had my price feed script silently crash on me during this time, and have setup a failsafe monitoring script to compare expected price feed output with what's actually being reported by my node.

Hopefully that works well to alert me if there's another issue, if it does I'll refine it and release the code for everyone. It's nothing fancy though I'm sure other witnesses can figure it out :)

1 missed block this week (3 ever)
Now averaging 23-24 blocks witnessed per day

Price feed and current parameters

No parameter changes to report this week :

I publish an unbiased price feed - last update was $1.154 SBD / STEEM .
SBD interest rate remains steady at 0% - to discourage hoarding whilst SBD is overvalued
Account creation fee remains at 0.2 STEEM - attempting to reduce signup cost (info)
Maximum block size remains at 65536 - all active witnesses agree on this value, I have no reason to argue.

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Steem Dollars continue to be in high demand, currently priced at $2.05 USD per SBD .

I expected prices to drop as the recent boost payouts started being sold in the market (supply++) but it seems like I underestimated the sheer demand for SBD out there.

Steemians should be taking advantage of these higher prices and sell SBD for double their face value while you can.

Do not use the internal convert option in your wallet for SBD's at this time - you will get a better deal on exchanges.

Software Updates and notes :

Steemd 0.18.5 & 0.19.0 RC1

As with previous versions I've gone through the motions and successfully built both 0.18/5 and the new HF 19 release candidate version - no issues to report I'm relieved to say.

I'm continuing to run steemd version 0.18.2 , as all releases since this version have been optional with no major features added to make it worth the switch yet imho.

A look over the other witnesses shows the entire top 10 still running version 0.18.1 , with only 4 witnesses in the top 50 advertising more recent versions.

I completely support HF19 and will upgrade my main node as soon as the final code has been released.

Steemit/Condensor patch submitted (vote % in dropdown)

I submitted pull request 1433 for steemit.com so that vote power percentages would be shown in the dropdown at the bottom of posts & comments.

The post I made about it got a huge amount of support (thank you!), and we just need it to be reviewed and accepted to get it live.

I'm hoping Hive account@picokernel's upvote was a positive sign towards that happening :)

Subreddit subscription boost

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I posted about the steemit subreddit, because a lot of new users may not be aware of it and its an easy way to show that we have an active community outside of steemit itself.

Seems like it may have helped, we're sitting at 1k subscribers now :)

SteemVids alpha minor update

I pushed a small but handy update to steemvids alpha so you can now search a specific users feed for videos.

See this post for more info - I've also continued making slow but steady progress on SteemVids beta :)

Reminder : Vote for Steem on BTCC (Final Round) !

Steem has progressed to the Final round of the BTCC exchange poll , but we're currently in last place :(

Results at time of posting :

If you have a twitter account PLEASE go vote for Steem to be added to BTCC exchange on this twitter poll :

https://twitter.com/bobbyclee/status/865851769116475392
- bobbyclee

Refusing payment on witness updates from now on

My last witness update got up over $500 , before someone flagged almost $300 off it on the last day.

I'm hoping it was simply due to a perceived disagreement on rewards, but I agree it was overvalued and from now on I will generally refuse payments on my witness update posts.

I've got a nice following, income and opportunity here already - I don't want to be draining the reward pool or pissing people off for no good reason.

The extra money was awesome (it paid my car rego!) but I'd rather provide value in other areas and treat my witness update like a weekly review from now on.