Ausbitbank Witness Update 17/7/17 (SBD interest changed to 1%)
Well this week has been brutal. The crypto-markets are in correction after a huuuge rise, and unfortunately Steem is no exception. The price drop, right after a hardfork and reward pool shrinkage will take some time to adjust to.
My witness campaign has gained a lot of votes, but no movement in my rank this week.
I haven't been blatantly buying witness votes "incentiving supporters" like some , so I really appreciate everyone that's shown their support for my witness campaign anyway!
I now have 954 witness votes and I'm at rank # 27
Witness node operations
My witness node hasn't dropped a single block , no price feed issue or network glitches logged by my monitoring tools the entire time :)
I also disable my node temporarily yesterday to update it to the latest steem-docker , but the update went smoothly with nothing to report there.
- 0 missed blocks this week (38 ever) .
- I'm now witnessing an average of 51 blocks each day .
Price feed and current network parameters
- I publish an unbiased price feed - last update was $0.933 SBD / STEEM
- SBD interest rate changed to 1% - To increase SBD demand and maintain USD peg
- 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 below $1, APR increased to 1%
After a great run trading at a premium well above the $1 usd price peg the market has switched gears into consolidation mode and Steem Dollars are now trading at a discount instead.
SBD demand has dropped, not helped by ongoing problems at Poloniex and they're currently trading for as low as $0.87 USD per SBD .
I hope people listened and sold for a premium like I've been advising for weeks already..
I also said in my last report :
If SBD prices are unable to maintain the $1 peg over the next week I will be following @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 still believe that this price movement has been mostly driven by the bitcoin downtrend/correction and less market liquidity being available due to continued trading downtime at Poloniex for Steem and SBD (again!) - however I can't ignore SBD slipping further then 10% away from the USD price peg.
I have cautiously updated my Steem Dollar APR/interest rate to 1% in an attempt to raise SBD demand and incentivize market makers to stick closer to the USD peg.
I don't take this change lightly - but I feel better about using the APR then influencing the market via price-feed biases.
Bandwidth limit exceeded errors
I see a lot of new users getting bandwidth exceeded errors when trying to transact (upvote, comment, claim rewards).
Whilst this is annoying , its nothing to panic about and it will resolve itself if you simply wait a while.
The super-quick explanation is that you are rate limited in your transactions depending on how much Steem Power you have and the level of activity on the network at the time.
You can speed up the process and avoid this in future by powering up a little extra Steem Power, if you can't and need urgent access to your account come find me in the PAL chat and I'll delegate a small amount to get you going again.
I've been voting for an increased block size of 131,072 for over a month already, if more witnesses followed suit (Or I moved up the ranks more) we could fix this issue faster.
More info :
I launched @discordia
I launched an experimental vote-bidding bot @discordia : a chaos themed vote bot with a manual curation element that can potentially give far higher relative rewards for quality original content when compared to blind-voting whale bots.
Legendary steemian researcher @fortified surprised me with a whole set of beautiful logos and animations for discordia - check out his post !
Due to its ability to leverage bids into more SP, @discordia has been growing at a crazy pace - already leasing 20k SP in only a few days of operations so far.
I understand peoples concerns about the general use of vote bots - and have been making a conscious effort to make sure this provides a net positive to the community as a whole.
I'm not personally taking any money from this despite spending hundreds of SBD and steem so far to get it started, and anybody else can directly profit from this by filling the SP delegation orders in the minnowbooster market.
After the first month to get itself established and build reserves, it will be doing a controlled partial powerdown of its own SP supply in order to fund @centerlink, @ausbitbot and a donation fund for good causes decided on by the community.
What else have I been doing ?
I've been working with the super talented @malicered on some new slick branding for steemvids , as well as making more progress on the interface and workflow of the steemvids beta version. (Follow @steemvids for announcements!)
I've tweaked the algorithm for @centerlink - a vote bot (parodying the Australian welfare office) that now support
176aussie steemians. It's also putting out plenty of aussie humour of its own in multiple parody posts / "success stories " to help it grow. Thanks for the community support and fundraising efforts to @scooter77 @bulleth @ryivhnn and @gohba.handcraftsI've done several interviews with various steemians, with a few more outstanding I need to get back to ( I'm so sorry @nextgen622, I haven't forgotten <3 ).
I've purchased thousands of SBD below the peg price and have been researching various market making bots in order to try and tighten up the price gap between exchanges and the internal market. I'd like to see a lot more people doing this, and I appreciate having my orders filled by @smooth-mm most of the time but some more competition and higher liquidity would be great to see on the internal market.
I've been studying usage patterns of all of the vote bots as well as the abuse flagging projects like @cheetah , @smackdown.kitty and @copypastewaster . I have @shame and @bitchplease available to dedicate to the cause, I'm just trying to find the best way to approach this and not make more enemies ..
I've continued to moderate on r/steemit , tech-support and the Peace, Abundance, Liberty discord as well as several fakebook groups promoting Steemit .
I haven't slept before 4am for 2 weeks now, I'm sure there's a lot more I'm forgetting in this list :P
Payout declined
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Please vote for me as a witness here
Incredible stuff man! I know you are a part of MSP and idk if you saw my post the other day, but I want to apologize in case you did! You've had my witness vote for a while now and you certainly don't disappoint!
Also, you addressed one of my concerns :)
I think bots MAY be the end of Steemit. However I am working on a bot... and I use bots, ok. I am a HYPOCRITE, but also HUMAN. I am a tech guy who fears the power of the tech he is working on... in principle, these bots scare me. Lately, I have been wondering, why do we need bots? Why can't we just have people vote for content they think is good and just leave it at that?
I'd be very interested in a community forum or something on bots because... and I am not accusing you or anyone (because I have wrongly done so already this week)... but I believe it may be easy to abuse this bot system. I am not saying you or anyone else DOES abuse the pay for votes system, I am simply saying IT IS EASY to do so. Please understand the difference. You, and all others so far, seem to be doing GOOD with your bots. But, all it takes is one selfish individual and the platform may be in danger. We are playing with fire here and need to make sure those with matches are the right people. MSP is backed by 6 witnesses... good people. Your bot is backed by you, good person. The next bot may be backed by a selfish, profiteering individual and that would not be good.
Hope this makes sense and I'd love to discuss in the discord! Anyways, cheers and Steem on!
I did see it, it triggered me a bit and I passed it onto aggroed cos I wasn't sure how to respond to it at the time. It really kinda upset me to think that's how the project was being perceived..
I just saw and appreciate the followup apology post though thankyou :)
I was actually completely against the idea of vote bidding and what's happening now with the liquid SP market for the longest time, but now I'm starting to see this as just another part of the ecosystem thats going to happen if we like it or not.
At least now the votebidding is on the blockchain instead of private chat conversations, by forcing transparency and bringing these tools out in the open we have a better chance as a whole to recognise and counter abuse by them..
Will send a quick message over discord too
Thanks for understanding. Sent you a rather lengthy discord message :)
I think this is a topic that should be discussed among the Steemian higher ups because it seems to be having a profound affect on the platform.
Cheers!
Perfect mate as usual. You're doing a tremendous job for all of us. I would like to advise all Steemians to evaluate the price of SBD before trading it in the free market. One reason the price has fallen below the peg is in my opinion the ignorance that exists among new Steemians when it comes to alternatives to the free market, such as converting SBD to STEEM through the built-in function which takes 3.5 days but will treat each SBD like 1 USD, and/or choosing to power up 100% rather than 50/50 which will essentially do the same thing as convert but with your future SBDs.
Thanks mate - good point too not enough realise this ^^
Wow, quite a post. Very impressive.
I actually read it (long-ish).
I think it points out a few issues:
There seems to be this HUGE disconnect, where AUTHORS think commenters can't upvote themselves in any way with any validation, but it's still cool, to upvote your own articles?
In my opinion, this is addressed in the white paper, early on, as simple comments vs story posts weight of return on upvotes.
Period.
This is the 3rd comment I've seen from you recently where I just sorta stare for a while trying to understand what your point is.
There's a difference between a post self-vote and a comment self-vote - one's just selfish and the other is selfish AND rude because it's like you're saying my comment should be seen before all others - its more important.
AGAIN you felt the need to push your own comment to the top of the page and pay yourself.
That's getting adjusted soon if you don't remove your self-vote, just sayin..
Period.
Sure, will it push my comment back down the field, or no?
(Otherwise I guess damage is done then?
MOST will want to push their comments to top, no?
Should this be allowed then?)
Keep in mind, me, plus most others, are all new here.
We are not witnesses, we have not been on the platform for a year or more, and we do not know what we are doing, so we experiment quite a bit, and see what people have to say about it.. for one.
Just saying, authorship is not trump to comments, as far as being valuable to others. At least, not more than 60/40, or whatever is in the white paper.
Often, I have no idea what to think of a post, till I read about 10 comments about it..
Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?
WTF? Searches for BS guide to figure out what yogibear is talking about
Yeah thats the idea, to move this off the top of my witness thread. It's been a day and you haven't removed your vote so I just tried to flag you with the bare minimum to move you down without just destroying your reputation.
Expect this to keep happening if you keep pushing your own comments to the top of other peoples posts
Busy guy, doing a lot of great things! Keep it up man, the community is thankful.
Exactly what kind of abuse are you looking to flag? If it's a matter of self-voting vs distributing among the community, you can potentially run a calculator to see what percentage of vote power is spent on each and flag once it hits a certain threshold.
Anything over 50 or 60% self vote I personally see as abuse. Some may feel differently.
Thats the tricky question really, figuring out the ethics of interfering between one SP holders exerting their rights as a stakeholder in the network via upvote, and another stakeholder doing the same via flag.
Its a complex issue that goes way beyond simple abuse prevention, I'm glad smarter minds are experimenting with this in public so I can learn how not to commit steemicide here :P
I agree with your method tho, I like to see people contribute at LEAST 50% of their VP to other users..
See also : https://steemit.com/steem/@transisto/two-proposed-hf-policy-change-for-countering-reward-based-abuses
You know, once we have a guideline and we can agree on this, I think most would be happy to follow it..
and it's simple enough at that point to bot-enforce I assume.. (Robocop is my favorite late sci-fi movie)
I hope we can all agree this is mostly a new issue; it has not been addressed in the FAQ, and probably did not come to the fore until HF19.
This has been an issue since day 1 imo, linear rewards just made the problem WAY worse and easier to abuse.
Keep up the great work Adam! You are doing the whole of Steemit proud in all your endevours. We at Team Australia - raise a XXXX in your honour! SK as TA - (tried to get above Yogi but couldn't).
Good post mate, been trying to piece together what the heck is going on in the cryptoworld! And more importantly, when things will return to normal.
I hear what you're saying, I've been stalking bittrex prices, and consistently see SBD sub 1.00 usd, happy to see that you're taking action to stop that.
Totally thankful for the mention, we're going to make good things happen, and I can't wait to see what you do with steemvids. I'll be following your content closely for more news and updates! Thanks Ausbitbank!
Yes the week was brutal, I needed a little money, not much so I powered down for two weeks, which I figured would cover with Steem some money I owe, also it would be a way to see if localbitcoins.com really works, I live in Honduras and cashing bitcoins is practically impossible here, at least to my knowledge, and then this crash just made it impractical to make the transaction, I would have done it at maybe $1.80 but as it stands now I would rather keep my Steem and wait for a rebound in price. I was going to vote for you for witness but it appears I voted for you quite a while back.
You're doing really a great job @ausbitbank. Starting many initiatives for steemit like @discordia and @ausbitbot , you're just awesome. For a community to run, a constant motivation and hard work is needed and you're doing it with perfection. I have taken services of discordia many times over, I would say it is the best voting bot I have ever seen on Steemit.
I also got some votes from you personally from your account, I dont is it because of my content of something else but I am highly honored to have your vote. I highly respect you for your contribution.
A big thumbs for your work and wish you all the success.
Thanks i am a often user on discordia. great work.
Just wonder if this means the 1% interest on sbd is effective or not. And if sbd is more attractive, does that mean if will give further pressure to steem as sbd looks safer and people will rush for safety asset during the downtime. The balance here looks crucial.
There are definately some interesting economics going on here, it doesn't work how you might expect.
Stronger SBD pegging could even improve the price of Steem, as more people from the great crypto economy use it as a hedge against falling crypto prices. More eyes and utility from this network = higher price for its token .
Also since SBD is technically only an IOU for $1 of STEEM, stronger SBD = more faith in the ability to extract $1 USD ea from the network in the future.
This is my first tweak of the APR parameter since becoming a witness, I'll be monitoring both price and other witnesses votes closely to see if this was the right choice or not because you're right, the balance is crucial here
thanks very much for dropping in and upvoting my meet up in Sydney post -it means a lot to me that your keeping an eye on my progress here - love and light-keep rockin- David