TimCliff Witness Update 2017-08-03

Hello Everyone!

Here is what I've been up to since my last witness post:

• The results of the "10,000 Flyers" marketing campaign are in. You can read about it here.
• I submitted a GitHub Development Report letting the community know what I see the dev team up to, based on the activity in GitHub.
• I have been reviewing the proposal for HF20, and discussing with the dev team + other witnesses.
• I continue spending a lot of time in the steemit.chat "help" channel, helping users with various issues and questions. Most are related to account creation and signup issues.
• I continue to review and respond to issues in the steem and condenser GitHub repositories. I have also opened several issues for glitches that I have encountered or were reported to me by other users.
• I created the latest edition of the Reports from the Witnesses series. This report provides the community with an aggregated report of all the witness reports from the past week.
• I submitted Pull Request 1619 to update the FAQ to let users know that account creation may take up to one week for accounts to be approved.
• I am continuing to fund @moataz's Facebook advertising campaign to bring more people to Steemit. So far, we have received 6,700 clicks, reaching 77,000 people and generating over 300,000 impressions! More details about the campaign are here.

Some Information / Suggestions:

• @ericvancewalton, @dougkarr, @the-alien and @andrarchy are working on a really cool project to create a blockchain based mini-series called HardFork. It seems like it is going to be amazing, and could help to bring mainstream attention to the Steem blockchain.
• Holy cow! We are up to 126,500 unique visitors on Steemit.com per day. That is a lot of people visiting Steemit!!
• My spouse ( @artist1989 ) and I are going to SteemFest!! (Details.)
• If you are an experienced React / JavaScript developer, Busy.org is hiring. Check out the details here.
• The Steemit dev team has an official blog now. If you are interested in hearing what they are up to, follow @steemitdev.

Forward Looking Plans:

• Continue my involvement with existing projects.
• I have some projects to work on in condenser, but they are on pause for now due to Issue 1609. Hopefully things will be un-stuck soon.
• Once issue 1609 is resolved, I have plans to try and get more community developers involved in condenser (Steemit.com) development. More details will be posted soon.

Summary of Current Witness Parameters:

• SBD Interest Rate: There is a lot of discussion on the SBD APR/interest rate right now. My view is that it is intended to react to long-term market trends, and not short term fluctuations/spikes/dips. Currently the peg seems to be holding very close to $1 USD (hovering between $0.95 and $1.05), which is right where we want it. Based on this, I do not currently see a need to provide additional demand for SBD via interest. I am monitoring the peg closely though, and may decide to add a small amount of interest if it seems necessary.
• Price Discount: Currently the debt level is at 1.2%, and SBD is pegged close to $1 USD. Based on this, I see no need for a price feed discount at this time.
• Registration Fee: My registration fee is currently set to 0.2 STEEM. This makes it so that a new account costs 6 STEEM (non-delegated) which is about $7.50 USD at current market prices.
• Maximum Block Size: I currently have my block size set to 65,536. There seem to be no issues related to bandwidth after the 19.1 soft-fork, so I am comfortable with the consensus on this parameter given the current system use.

I welcome feedback if you think there are things that I can be doing better as a witness. If you think I am doing a great job, I would really appreciate your witness vote!

https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!