Curation and witness report

This is my first curation report in nearly one and a half months, and my first ever witness report.

Curation

In my last curation report towards the end of June, I was optimistic about making the debilitating voting power costs in HF19 work. Alas, 7 weeks on from Hardfork 19, I haven't been able to succeed. I have tried various strategies - even extreme ones like voting most posts at 1% strength (more on that below) - but every day, I run out of VP far too quickly. I'm well aware I'm an outlier, so it's entirely my problem. Currently, I'm only able to curate 45 minutes to 1 hour per day.

A few weeks ago, I discovered some odd behaviour, where low strength votes seem to ignore Voting Power up to ~50% VP. It would matter if my VP was 100% or 52% - the end r-shares and payout generated would be the same. I reported this in witness on Steemit.chat. I don't possess the technical acumen to investigate the code and file a GitHub report, but hope someone looked at my report in witness channel and is checking it out.

The obvious conclusion to make here would be to keep the optimal voting power would be above 50%, while making tons of 0.1%-1%, which are much more efficient in the first place.

Nevertheless, even with these hacks, the vote power reserve rate of 10 is not working for me. With the exponential growth of Steem, I'd say this should be at the very minimum of 80. Looking at voting trends for top curators on Steem, 80 would be a reasonable compromise. With great regret, I have been scaling down my personal curation activities. I hope to focus more on finding posts for Curie in the coming weeks.

I have been going easy on curation this week, considering better strategies. That Streemian is down makes this the right time to reflect and evolve.

Since Curie's new recommendation program, it has been a great pleasure to mentor new curators to submit to Curie. Like other top curators, I have a limit of 3 per week. This week, I have recommended 3 curators. All three are relatively unknown, unsung heroes, who are actively engaged and seek out undiscovered gems; but never had the follower base or SP to make an impact. I hope to see Curie empowering them.

Like everyone, I'm awaiting Communities eagerly.

Witness

This week, I became an accidental witness. Surprisingly, even at my lowly rank of #80, I can just about break even on a powerful dedicated server with 64 GB RAM at a reputed service provider. If I ever rise up the ranks, I intend to invest in a backup witness node, a seed node, and a full RPC node. I shall, however, wait for 0.19.2, which seems like a major architectural overhaul. I anticipate significant changes to hardware requirements when 0.19.2 goes live, and will base my future infrastructure investments on 0.19.2's requirements.

By my calculation, a top witness can afford to offer multiple numbers of all of those, including private seed nodes for maximum security. Plus, hire someone in the opposite time zone to manage a backup node. If Steem were ever to go viral, I'd look for 24x7 support and multiple redundancies as a key element to voting top 20 witnesses.

Anyway, back to reality. At this time, I'm not meddling with economic parameters. The market is still highly unstable, and going by a hundred years of history, it would be prudent to be cautious at this time. The exchanges can't seem to run a Steemd node reliably either. I don't believe the current prices of both STEEM and SBD are reflective of medium-term trading, or even short-term trading. I shall, of course, watch the markets closely to see how this situation develops.

I do not intend to make these reports a regular thing. This was an exceptionally drab post - my apologies. :) Indeed, I'll only report back when there's something significant to discuss. Be rest assured, however - I shall continue working quietly, behind the scenes.