Why not publish your Cheetah expenses as a regular report? We can upvote those reports to help pay for the costs and/or transfer funds to your account as needed. If Steemit, inc doesn't pay for services like this that the whole ecosystem needs, then other witnesses can pitch in and/or part of the rewards pool can be used. These services are really important and the burden for those costs shouldn't be on one individual.
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Publicizing specifically the Cheetah expenses is interesting idea that I hadn't thought about. At the moment it's covered by the logs and my witness pay, so I haven't seen the need to seek more external funding. I think if I wanted to do that, at that point I should also become more transparent with my total witness pay -- something no witness is currently doing as far as I am aware. Perhaps it could be a good thing, to be open and honest about everything, perhaps it would be a bad thing to have people judge the fact that I bought a milkshake yesterday because I felt like I was allowed to spend my salary on a small treat for myself (and let me tell you, as a frugal person, such things are rare for me to allow for myself...)
I think I am hesitant to externalize the Cheetah expenses from my witness pay however. When we say "the whole ecosystem needs this", I'm not actually sure that is true. No, it's not necessary for the ecosystem, but perhaps it is desirable for prosperity. Something like this falls somewhere in line with a voluntary free market approach. If 'the people' want Cheetah, 'the people' can have her, but there is no authoritarian entity like Steemit Inc. enforcing it -- and thus Steemit Inc. has no obligation to pay for it, 'the people' do.
This is kind of how I have been running SC & Cheetah, as free market enterprises. If I were to be unable to afford Cheetah, then 'the market', and 'the people', have collectively decided that it is not worth it. That would happen for example if I dropped out of the Top 20 -- in such a case, the stakeholders would have shown that it is not important to them anymore.
Which also brings an interesting question, if SC / Cheetah are free market solutions, should I be able to profit off of them? For the case of SC, I currently take absolutely nothing from it, and it is run like a non-profit: 100% of the income is distributed back to the community. It's easy to verify that from the SC account transfer history. For Cheetah, it's been a negative profitability enterprise if you discount my witness pay subsidizing it (the daily logs haven't covered the pay except in rare occurrences like 5$ SBD days). But it's an interesting question to think if Cheetah should be non-profit as well, if her log income ends up exceeding her expenses. Am I 'allowed' to profit off of something I have put hundreds of development hours into, and thousands of support hours into? Or, should it not be subsidized by my witness pay, and in this case disappear because the expenses are larger than the income?
Just makes me think we really need to have worker proposals here on Steem so that the voters can truly decide on that answer. For now, I'm comfortable tying the idea that my position as a witness is directly tied to the desirability that 'the people' have in SC & Cheetah.
I'll have to think more about publishing my witness expenses, income, taxes... etc. as it is an interesting question (as well as specifically just those related to Cheetah). Out of curiosity, do you think you should publish what you do with your witness salary? (Hard question, eh?)
Enjoy your milkshakes, man! :)
I think "the people" are choosing to reward you as a witness, in part, because of the great things you've done to build Cheetah. We could go in circles talking about "needs" versus "wants," and you are technically correct, but I do think it provides great value which should be appreciated. People can't pay for something if they don't even know how much it costs. If they did know how much it costs to run Cheetah, they might appreciate it that much more.
I think anyone is free to profit off anything which the market demands and doesn't violate anyone's negative rights (i.e. go against the non-aggression principle). That's the beauty of open-market systems. When people pay for things with their own money, they more accurately understand the value of those things. Cheetah might be undervalued. It might be something people don't appreciate enough which makes them think spam, plagiarism, abuse, identity theft, etc is not an issue they need to care about. I think it's an issue we all have to care about because this is our collaborative commons. Maybe Cheetah could be wildly profitable for you (once people properly value it) which would bring in cheetah competitors, innovation, competition, etc and might even make your job easier while improving the entire ecosystem. Reminds me of how they paradoxically started saving endangered species by creating a market for selling hunting tags.
I'm totally fine with publishing what I do with my witness salary (at this point) because I haven't done much with it. I pay for expenses only, for the most part. I keep it powered up and use that delegation to help projects I think are adding value. That said, I did recently (I think it was last week?) trade out some STEEM (I think 1000?) for my own personal cryptocurrency trading. I hadn't done that before and it felt a bit like your milkshake. :) Ultimately, I think the community pays witnesses to do a job with the funds they are given and they are free to use those funds however they want as long as they are directly paying people who vote for them (though with the recent community witness popping up, that line may get a little blurry). The way those funds are used will be part of how they are evaluated as witnesses. I'm all for transparency.