jesta witness update - 2016-11-11

I think I'm planning on sticking to these updates at bi-weekly rate for now, since last week I didn't have much interesting to report and was pretty busy. This week, with next week's upcoming changes, I felt it was a good time to chime in.

1. Accomplished the week of 2016-11-11:

• Upgraded all the steem.ws/witness/seed steem servers to 0.15.0
• I've started migrating steemdb to a better server, and it will now use it's own private steem instance for increased speed.
• The new greymass.com website is now running on an optimized setup of reprint. It's no where near finished in terms of layout/design/pages, but I'm almost at the point where I can say the server infrastructure is good and will scale well.
• I have started slowly talking to a few people who want reprint websites, and plan on using these sites as our proof of concept. We also have our own slack now to specifically keep topics on track for greymass/reprint.
• Fixed an issue with how proxy votes were tallied on steemdb (thanks @abit!)
• Added global witness voting history to steemdb.
• Explored Google/AWS/Docker/Kubernetes versions of container solutions for use within a large multi-site reprint installation.
• Lots of discussions about the upcoming inflation changes (I'll go into my thoughts below)

2. Upcoming projects/goals

• Right now I'm working on a steemdb plugin for reprint. This plugin will allow anyone with a reprint site to pull data via a plugin/api in ways the blockchain currently doesn't allow for (optimally).
• Expand the steemphp library to include more different types of information.
• Continue development of reprint, and launch the greymass.com site as something I'm happy with.
• A day or two will be set aside for the 0.16.0 fork coming soon. Currently I have 8-10 steemd servers running at any given moment, and I discovered this week that upgrading all of these servers takes a bit of time!

3. Thoughts from this week

Major changes on the horizon in terms of the steem economy, and I for one am glad we're seeing some progress. However, I don't like the fact that there are so many unrelated changes all being bundled into a single update. This sentiment has been mirrored by many witnesses I've spoken with. It will be interesting to see if we actually end up delaying this update because of this bundled approach.

Point by point, here's where my thoughts are...

1. Reduce inflation to 9.5%/year: I'm on board. The 9.5% might be low, but I think it'll be great to swing from one extreme to the other for a while.
2. Allocate 75% of the created Steem to the Reward Fund: Agreed.
3. Allocate 15% of the created Steem to the Vesting Fund as interest on Steem Power: Agreed.
4. Allocate 10% of the created Steem to the Witnesses: Agreed. Though I do think the reduction in witness pay might cause financial danger to the project's witnesses (myself included) support. If that means alternate financing must be sought, so be it. Reducing the amount of inflation is more important.
5. Increase backup witness's pay: Neutral. If you look at it from the infrastructure point of view, backup witnesses aren't as important for block production simply because they don't produce as much. Beyond just producing blocks, I do believe there are people outside of the 19 that deserve funding. The mentality right now seems to be that witness funding isn't meant for funding projects (which I also disagree with). Overall - increasing the amount backup witnesses get paid, while decreasing the amount primary witnesses receive seems counter intuitive. I won't stand in the way of this change though, I just don't know what it solves.
6. Increase miner's pay: Currently against. The mining queue is dominated by 2 people because they aren't sharing the software, and that doesn't add much value to the network. Mining is about decentralization, and two miners isn't decentralized. I will support an increase in mining rewards if we change to a more open algorithm where everyone can GPU mine (Equihash?).
7. Witnesses and miners would be paid in STEEM rather than Steem Power: Current against for miners, due to the same reasons above. I am willing to support this shift once we have a better POW system. Overall though, I do like the idea of mining/witness rewards being paid in a liquid fund, it just doesn't make sense now.
8. Votes for witnesses would expire after 3 months: Against, it doesn't solve any problems. If this happens, I'm just going to setup a bot to renew my votes... which in turn will just create excess traffic on the blockchain. It solves nothing, as anyone with significant vote weight will likely do the same.
9. Reducing the Steem Power holding period to a minimum of 3 months: Agreed, and almost the exact same thoughts as I wrote in #1. It might be a little too short, but I'm willing to see how it plays out and adjust accordingly. From what I understand is this will be a witness parameter, which means it'll be easy enough to change.
10. Reduce the SBD delay from 7 days to 3 (or 3.5) days: Agreed.

Most of my objections right now involve the mining queue, simply because the changes benefit two people specifically (rabbit/supercomputing). I don't know why we would make a change that benefits them, and no one else. I'd go so far as to say I agree with @joseph, and I wouldn't even mind if POW mining was removed until a more decentralized solution was put in place.

Overall, these are a great set of changes to alter the rate of inflation and hopefully create some confidence in the economy. It'll be an interesting few weeks as we all continue discussing these changes and the impact they have for steem!

4. Previous week's update

Update for the week ending 2016-10-30

Finally, don't forget to vote for witnesses here.