Ausbitbank Witness Update 8/7/17

I'm sorry for the short and late report this week, we're in the home stretch of School Holidays now and I'll be back to giving Steemit the full focus it deserves once my kids aren't driving me insane.

I'm still manually curating a lot, maintaining my servers and bots, moderating on the P.A.L discord server, helping new users on steemit.chat's tech-support channel , and clearing the neverending spam from /r/steemit - but what I really want to do is finish the steemvids beta already..

I'll be back to my regular schedule from next Monday, and I'm hoping to be able to show off some new Hive account@steemvids branding/logo ideas soon!

I now have 792 witness votes and I'm at rank # 27

Witness node operations

Nothing to really report here this week, everything's run smooth-as-silk for once without a single missed block , price feed issue or momentary network glitches logged by my monitoring tools the entire time :)

0 missed blocks this week (38 ever) .
I'm now witnessing an average of 47 blocks each day .

Price feed and current network parameters

I publish an unbiased price feed - last update was $1.51 SBD / STEEM
SBD interest rate remains steady at 0%
Account creation fee remains at 0.2 STEEM - attempting to reduce signup cost (info)
Maximum block size remains at 131,072 - to lower the SP requirements to transact (more info).

Steem Dollars back to ~$1

SBD demand has dropped, alongside continued problems at Poloniex and they're currently priced at $0.97 USD per SBD .

I personally expect they will probably bounce further once Poloniex resumes normal trading, so I'm holding my steem dollars for the moment.

If SBD prices are unable to maintain the $1 peg over the next week I will be following Hive account@clayop's lead and increase my APR but I would prefer to avoid this option as I believe this is only temporary panic in the market.

I'd still really like us to attempt timcliff's proposed solution to restore the $1 SBD peg (TLDR: Reverse Conversion) ..

Hive account@centerlink continues to grow in power

I've made some further tweaks to Hive account@centerlink's bot code this week, and it's now supporting 226 Aussie Steemians and growing fast !

Hive account@centerlink now has 1068 Steem Power + 2525 SP delegated by supporters and a growing curation trail

This project is now also officially recognised as part of Hive account@minnowsupport , and as such all delegators TO Hive account@centerlink will receive automated votes on their posts from Hive account@msp-lovebot :)