Ausbitbank Witness Update 20/6/17 (HF19 in 3 hours!)

We're now in the final 3 hours before the Steem network upgrades to "Equality" v0.19.0 .

I can feel the tension and uncertainty in the air !

This week I've gained over 100 new voters, some with decent SP holding but not quite enough to advance another rank yet.

I now have 408 witness votes and I'm at rank # 27 :D

Witness node operations

This week I upgraded my node to the latest release version of steemd from the release candidate version I had been using.
I temporarily disabled my signing key using @furions conductor toolkit while I upgraded using the latest steem-in-a-box from @someguy123 .

It took a little longer then I expected to get my node back online, and I made a stupid mistake copying from my own outdated notes - I re-enabled using the wrong signing key causing my node to miss a block anyway.

I facepalmed, fixed my fail and since then it hasn't had any issues at all running the new software since.

1 missed blocks this week (10 ever) .
I'm now witnessing an average of 52 blocks each day .

Price feed and current network parameters

I publish an unbiased price feed - last update was $2.220 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 131,072 - to lower the SP requirements to transact (more info).

Steem Dollars still trading above $1

Steem Dollars continue to be in high demand, currently priced at $1.75 USD per SBD .

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

Steemians should be taking advantage of these higher prices and sell SBD above 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.

You should also avoid doing 100% Steem Power posts at this time, you will make more money if you use the 50/50 option and then trade the SBD you get for Steem.

On the upcoming hardfork

The next hardfork is scheduled for: Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:00:00 UTC

The upcoming tweaks to vote power and the daily vote target/rate will change the way both users and bots curate on the site - and it's extremely hard to predict what the trending page and payouts will look like in the upcoming days/weeks .

I don't expect it to be immediately devastating like the last major fork was because the reward pool will remain intact .

However past story payouts could potentially see major changes - if you have mostly whale support your payout may drop, if you have a lot of minnow/orca support they may rise.

Since I've been blessed with delegated SP I've been really enjoying my increased influence here and I think I've voted fairly and used that influence to reward a huge amount of people.

Having a lot of SP means you can vote with a low vote strength and still make a worthwhile impact on payouts but for a larger amount of people overall - the current 40 vote target means I could give 4000 1% votes out every day (for example). Moving to 10 means that I can only vote on 1000 people before losing vote strength.

@timcliff wrote a great post summarising the potential payout changes with the HF-19 launch that prompted this comment below from @liberosist :

I'm trying to stay positive and think of the increased minnow influence - but all I can think about is how is this going to affect some of my recent projects like @centerlink .

Steemfest Travel Fund

I have been fundraising for the Steemfest travel reimbursement fund using a combination of my powerdown , sending post rewards and direct post beneficiary splitting.

Unfortunately I didn't realise at the time that rewards split using this method are sent as Steem Power only - not liquid funds :(

These are the payouts visible in the t-r-f transfer history :

5 days ago { "type": "comment_benefactor_reward", "benefactor": "t-r-f", "author": "ausbitbank", "permlink": "-from-0-to-100k-aud-in-11-months-thanks-to-steem", "reward": "547792.721399 VESTS" }

7 days ago { "type": "comment_benefactor_reward", "benefactor": "t-r-f", "author": "ausbitbank", "permlink": "new-seed-node-online-a-seedsteemvizcom", "reward": "727293.401466 VESTS" }

But right now the funds sit in limbo unclaimed and unusable - I made a mistake but there's still time.

We need @t-r-f and @roelandp to claim those rewards and start a powerdown so all the donations are available as liquid funds.

Donation total so far :

Steemfest Travel Fund post rewards donation #1 - 552.036 SBD / ~$960 USD
1 powerdown of 1346 Steem (currently valued at $2900 USD)
351 Steem Power from my my seed node announcement post (currently valued at $760 USD)
264 Steem Power from my from 0-100k AUD in 11 months post (currently valued at $570 USD)

= ~$5190 USD donated for Steemfest :D

@centerlink now supports 119 Aussie steemians

I've been delegating SP and donating post rewards to try and kickstart a few initiatives for the Aussie community - @teamaustralia and @centerlink .

After being around for less then a week @centerlink already sponsors 119 Steemians with votes.

I've spent some time customising my own version of @personz FOSSBOT voter and for now the algorithm is pretty basic - but now we a much more flexible system for complicated rulesets in the future :)

Vote power is set at 10% for now, but will need to be decreased further when the hardfork kicks in soon.

Checking @centerlink stats in the P.A.L discord chat

#teamaustralia member @gohba.handcrafts also had the great idea to help fund centerlink by holding a chook raffle to win a custom handcrafted pen/stylus .

Entries are still open for 3 more days - just send $2 SBD to @centerlink with the memo code chook raffle to enter the draw!

Witness Update Post Reward Giveaway Update

Whilst looking through this weeks blocks witnessed by my node I wasn't able to find enough eligible quality posts for every day that I felt were worthy of being sent at least $50+ each.

So I've decided to postpone this weeks giveaway and will instead use the liquid rewards of this post to powerup up both @centerlink and @minnowsupport .

I will continue the giveaway in my next weeks update, but this week it was just a really unlucky selection of blocks I ended up getting - mostly filled with votes and comments not top level posts.