Hello! My second official witness report, covering the last 14 days. As a backup witness, this is probably an okay frequency for reports I think.
Current rank: 82
I rose to around 93 for most of the last two weeks, but just today I got a vote which put me to 82. Thanks everyone for your votes, it means a lot! 😊
I've been catching blocks every 1 or 2 days so far and haven't missed one yet. You can see my stats on steemdb.com
Price feed and block size
The price of Steem has gone down, which is bad in the short term but probably good in the long term as more people, especially new people, will no doubt buy. I will be doing this too 🙂
Regarding my price feed, I have decided to update it less regularly, as fellow witness noted that there is less of a reason for backup witnesses to do this and I agree, we should be proportionate to our influence and not over play things.
I moved my SBD interest to 2% as SBD was trading low and I took advice from other witnesses on this.
Block size increase! Hot news!
I said last time that I would be looking into the block size increase issue. Well it really took off today when @rycharde posted with some of his research on users reaching their bandwidth limit, effective locking them out of the system. Some guys from Minnow Support came together with us to talk about it and bring it to the higher up witnesses.
@someguy123 and @neoxian (and many others) had been advocating larger block size for a while, but this new research convinced me. Basically the bandwidth (allowed activity) for some accounts had beed reduced so low that they could not meaningfully operate, and while some other witnesses made the case that it is not because of the block size as such, it can be fixed by it, if only temporarily.
I took the trouble of looking through the code to find out about it and it became clear how the low bandwidth indicator current_reserve_ratio works, and that the value were are seeing is very low indeed. @someguy123 posted here calling witnesses to increase their block size, and I petitioned several myself in direct messages.
Just in the last few hours the block size has increased by 50% to 98304 bytes. This will increase bandwidth over all, but the issue needs to be investigated further to make sure it's the best solution.
On this point I would like to say that don't be afraid to unvote witnesses who do not keep up with making important changes to their config. Your vote is your voice in this.
Against uncooperative voting - first week
Through the #steem-coop I lead the coding part of Project Smackdown, a project against uncooperative voting. This is largely concerned with self voting, but also extends to sock puppet accounts and so-called "circle jerk" voting (always voting for your friends).
There are three main parts to the project:
- A bot to find the highest self rewarded comments and flag them ( @smackdown.kitty )
- A campaign of solution finding, discussion and debate
- Advocation of a hard fork to fix the issues brought (or exacerbated by) HF 19
@smackdown.kitty
The 12th of July was the first day that the kitty watched the votes of the day and saw who was voting for themselves for large rewards. Each day since then we have created a report and flagged the top 20 comments as close as possible to cancelling the self vote reward only. In most cases this is all or nearly all the reward, but not always. Reports are being made daily for the first week, then it will be weekly (that's the plan anyway).
Regarding me as a witness, this is important because it will instantly put some people off supporting me who do not like flagging. I am very aware of this but ultimately came to the conclusion that it is exactly this kind of thing that witnesses should be doing. We are trying to make a difference with action and with words. You can't have one without the other.
Talking
Uncooperative voting is the kind of voting which only benefits the voter, or the voter clique. Reasonable voices in the co-op have swung me to the idea that full on prohibition would not work (and I just read this yesterday on a similar note), and to paraphrase the whitepaper, abuse cannot be stopped, and stopping it is not the goal.
Realigning incentives is the goal, so that it is more beneficial to vote for others in order to reward both them and yourself.
That's enough for now, there will be more posts directly on this topic and related in the near future.
Get involved in @smackdown.kitty
We are still in the testing phase and will stop running it tomorrow (Tuesday) to review the data and comments on this bot.
If we continue I will be making a call for SP delegations to the @smackdown.kitty account to give it's down votes a little more bite. I have delegated 500 SP, @the-ego-is-you has delegated 500 SP also and @l0k1 about 200 SP.
Please comment on our posts about this. It is a community project, and though we have taken the initiative your feedback is important.
Issue and pull request to Condenser (the steemit.com website)
The issue and PR here were accepted by Steemit devs and it has come into effect.
I won't go into it further because I made a whole post about it, read that if you missed it.
@treeplanter volunteer project launched!
Thanks to fellow witness @ausbitbank and other benefactors, the Tree Planter project has officially launched.
@kedjom.keku, is a conservationist working in Cameroon with a mission to restore 1 million trees to a local area which has seen it's tree population decline massively.
It is kind of hard to promote something like this as it can come across as spam. But I encourage you to check it out and use the voting bot (though not for self voting 😉). And please follow the account and share any posts which strike a chord with you.
It works by donating an amount of STEEM or SBD between 0.1 - 0.5 to @treeplanter with a steemit.com URL in the memo. The bot will up vote the post of your choice to the value of 1.5x the value you donated. At it's current SP these are the limits, but it will accept larger donations (and thus be able to up vote for larger amounts) as it grows.
#steem-coop
From 3 founding members we have doubled in size in the last two weeks. New members are, order of joining:
@transisto made a big splash by delegating 100k SP to the @smackdown.kitty account, giving us an actual ability to make an effect.
We have been busy working on #project-smackdown (see above) and talking about the problem of and solutions to uncooperative voting. It's really lively because within the group there is even a difference of opinion, but at the core we agree on the goal we're trying to achieve.
Note that @l0k1 is no longer a witness and has rebranded as @elfspice.
Steemit.chat moderation
We moved Steem Co-op chat from the CoAg channel to two new channels of our own: #steem-coop, which is private and for coop members to discuss and vote on what we do, and #steem-coop-public, which is public and open for anyone to come and discuss and propose ideas, talk about solution, etc. with us. Please join us for a chat!
500 followers
Slightly over 500 of you great Steemians have followed me. Thank you!