ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL.

---

Hi everyone, I just wanted to give a quick witness updated now that we've successfully hardforked. With many (but not all) of the Steemit team withdrawing their votes for witnesses, I am back in the Top 20 (which used to be 19, but now the miner has been replaced with a permanent top witness), if anyone was following that drama. HF 18 was a compromise, and I am glad Steemit listened to the community to implement it.

HF 18

The hardfork was a relatively smooth success. The reputation glitch was fixed with V0.18.2, and if you have any curation bots that consider this variable, you will need to upgrade. In addition, we all have noticed that the payouts went to a few cents. I know a lot of people are dissapointed, but at the end of the day, keep in mind, Steemit is beta and you were not promised a reward -- Steemit still works as a censorship free platform, and rewards are a bonus!

Price feed policy

There was some strange occurrences with the SBD market, where it seems the price per SBD rose to ridiculous proportions. There's a few theories flying around -- from pumpers not realizing its a pegged asset, to someone wanting to get their hands on converted steem without slippage in the steem market -- but we don't really know at this point. Some witnesses have decided to update the conversion bias to reflect a much stronger SBD, but I am on the fence right now about doing so. I think a strong SBD actually means we can increase the debt ceiling, and I would like to see this percentage (the percentage of market cap we can print in SBD) as a witness variable. There is no reason the debt ceiling cannot be higher if the currency is strong.

Anyways, I will hold off drastic changes to my feed for the meantime, but I reduced my interest rate to 2% and will likely reduce further shortly.

Cheetah bot

I'm still on the fence about keeping @cheetah alive for the long run, but in the mean time I have spent some time updating her logic in preparation to move over to Azure Cognitive Services. The API is more expensive, but it uses some form of artificial intelligence that I don't really understand, but seems great.

I will hopefully have the AI linked in shortly, and we'll see how much better the content detection is.