Witness update: @cervantes 14.04.2017

Hey there!!!. It is time to give a little update (in English) of our spanish witness activities:

Hardfork and Spanish community impact.

After the failed deployment a couple of weeks ago f the 0.17.x version of steemd due to non reached consensus, the 0.18.1 release was finally installed by the majority of the witnesses on the 30 March 2017. We were able to recompile our main witness node and also to keep producing blocks without a big impact.

Due to a change on the algorithm to calculate pay outs (for explanation, refer here the rewards were “reseted” to 0, and therefore almost inexistent. Payouts are beginning to recover now and will be fully restored at the end of April (aprox. 30 days after the hardfork).

Nevertheless the Spanish speaking community has kept writing and writting even knowing that the rewards were really limited.

Curation activities

It is still difficultfor spanish content to get noticed by the great majority of (english) speaking users, nevertheless there are several factors that are helping to gain visibility and rewards to spanish users.

• Thanks to @abit and @smooth, responsibles for the whale non-voting experiment, spanish speaking minnows, dolphins and orcas are able to make the difference with their votes on posts written in their languages.
• Thanks to @tamim and @pharesim, and also the increasing list of users who are still donating part of their voting power to support spanish posts.
• Thanks to @yoonjang0707 initiative to mutual curation support between members of non-english speaking communities.
• Thanks to the spanish-trail and successfull associated initiatives such as @tincho ’s spanish challenge.
• Thanks to the vibrant informal chatting community in our steemit.chat Hispanohablantes channel and their most prolific participants such as @loreennaa, @danilamarilu, @renzoarg, @aniestudio, @dresden, @walden, @nelyp, @moisesmcardona, @luisucv34 or @betamusic
• Also thanks to the always increasing number of supporters of the @cervantes witness

Too see the overview of posts curated by @cervantes since the 12.03.2017 post, please refer to this three lists:

• 08.03.2017- 25.03.2017
• 25.03.2017 - 04.04.2017
• 04.04.2017-07.04.2017

Summary of current witness parameters:

Price Discount: Our discount is set to 2%. The price for 1 SBD is just slightly above 1 USD (1.06 USD) but the SBD supply compared to the STEEM supply is too high (ratio is at 0.44%). The “debt” needs to be reduced and applying a price discount, will encourage the users to convert their SBD to STEEM. This means that when you convert SBD to STEEM using internal steem network exchange (i.e. using the steemit wallet) you will get 2% more STEEMS than in an external exchange using the average price feed.

SBD Interest Rate: Our SBD interest rate remains at 0%. Increasing the interest rate, will increase the available SBD supply and that is exactly what we would like to avoid for the time being.

Registration Fee: Our registration remains at 1 STEEM.

Some more Information.

• We choose to update manually all witness parameters, including the price feed. This allows us to reflect our own market perception avoiding failures due to automatic feeding.
• Since the beginning of our witnessing operations the main node has been running quite stable with only 10 missing blocks so far.
  . Our public seed nodes remains fully operational at: 88.99.33.113: 8092
• Given the price of the STEEM and our witness position in the producing queue (41 at the time of writing) we are now able to cover the hardware operating costs. Nevertheless we are neither powering down nor cashing out in order to increase the voting power of @cervantes and its contribution to the author rewards.

Spanish Community Support and Outreach.

• We keep encouraging new users commenting and voting their posts and giving support via the steemit.chat channel.
• We are working on the translation and of the steemit faq into spanish. Work is still in progress..
• We are preparing an outreach project to be announced very soon.

How to contribute with the @cervantes witness and with the spanish speaking community.

• (1) If you do not understand spanish, vote the spanish written posts recommended by us. For that, the most easy way is to follow the votes made by @cervantes. This is a guaranty for good quality spanish content. You can see our votes here:
• (2) You can alternatively delegate part of your voting power to @cervantes. Doing this is not yet straight forward since it is a new functionality introduced by the last hard fork and there is not yet any function on steemit.com. For doing this, please refer to this guide by @liberosist
• (3) You can, of course, approve the witness (@cervantes) using this link
• (4) You can join the channel HispanoHablantes in steemit.chat
• (5) You can write "good" and "original" post in spanish (don`t forget to tag them with #spanish).
• (5) You can "spread the steemit word" around your known spanish speaking friends, relatives and work-colleagues).

So far..

Your sincerely

Pablo @pgarcgo and Manu @gargon