Wackou witness update - 2016-10-10

Here comes my witness update for the last month. I didn't make weekly updates as I haven't been able to put a lot of work for Steem recently, due to real life taking so much of my time, and didn't feel like putting out an update without anything to say.

So, what have I been up to during the last month?

• I succesfully upgraded my witness to version 0.14.2 once consensus had been reached that this was the version to upgrade to. I did test 0.14.0 and helped discover some issues that led it to be rejected until 0.14.2 was published.
• I now apply a 12% discount to the feed for Steem dollars, as suggested by dan, abit and smooth, and updated the bts_tools to publish feed prices using a configurable discount value. Feed price is now also computed as the weighted average between Bittrex and Poloniex (it used only Bittrex before).
• the Steem seed nodes status page now loads much faster. Note that this doesn't show the real time status, the data on the page is refreshed every 5 minutes. Witness names are now clickable and lead to their witness thread for those that publish it on the blockchain. Table is sortable. I also plan to add uptime statistics at some point in the future.
• I have finally decided on the new name for the bts_tools, and will go with "Overmint", as suggested by gtg.
  He has been awarded 100 SD, and the other proposals 25 SD for their efforts (1, 2). "Buckmin" was pretty good too, I liked the concept ;)

Given that I hadn't been able to work as much as I would have liked recently, I decided to redirect some of my witness pay to initiatives that I felt were worthwhile, and so I sent:

• 5000 SD (1) to contribute to making Steemfest a reality. Great initiative by @roelandp which will definitely help Steemit build a strongly knit community, a great foundation for the future! Unfortunately, I am unable to attend due to other commitments, so I guess I'll have to wait for Steemfest 2 to see everyone...
• ~9000 SP to @robinhoodwhale (1, 2, 3), as I feel that curation initiatives are essential to reach an equilibrium where good content is rewarded appropriately. (Can't wait to see what comes out of curation guilds once implemented by the dev team!). I decided to support RobinHoodWhale instead of Project Curie as it seems to me that project Curie already has a lot of support, and I believe that if we want Steemit to be really decentralized, we will also need to have decentralization of curation initiatives.
• 1000 SP (1) to @projectnewbie, for the same reasons as above

With this post I would also like to announce that I'd be happy to become a "backup" witness, ie: not in the top 19 (but not too far either, eh :P ).

Being realistic, I already have too many other commitments to really dedicate a significant amount of time into Steem, and would prefer to temporarily take a step back. This doesn't mean I'll disappear (for sure not!), but I'll be focusing on maintaining what's already there (bts_tools managing a properly running witness with feed publishing, backup, etc. and seed node, as well as the seed nodes status page) and make sure it's as bug-free and generally reliable as possible, instead of developing new features / new projects (I do have so many ideas, though...) If I do develop new features (and I surely will, in time), I'll do it at my own pace, without the pressure associated with being one of the top witnesses.

Rest assured that I will stay ready to kick in in case experienced witnesses are needed, whether for dealing with fork issues (much less likely in the future) or helping test and debug release candidate versions.

I also want to say that I'm glad to see guys like @jesta, @anyx and @gtg entering in the top 19 witnesses. This only goes to show that over time, consistently contributing witnesses do end up gaining rank while others slide out, and the system eventually converges naturally towards the best allocation of its resources. A beautiful example of delegated proof-of-stake in action!

Steem on!