Witness Update - @cervantes - 10.03.2017

Hard (fork) times.

Due to the up-coming hard fork, the activities of the steem-guild has been stopped. The main consequence for the spanish speaking community has been the (temporal) lost of whale voting power necessary to keep rewarding the good quality content.

All of this comes suddenly in a situation where, regardless the low price of the STEEM, the spanish community was gaining momentum with a average of 20 high quality original Spanish post written and rewarded per day. And a steadily growing spanish speaking user base in both, the blockchain (tag #spanish) and the steemit.chat channel "Hispanohablantes" - with 167 registered users.

Still some hope

The Spanish speaking user base has not yet grown into millions and given the current distribution of the stake, the content will not gather the necessary voting power to make it worth writing. This situation has been understood by some supporting high stake users such as @smooth which have agreed to vote on spanish content based on our recommendations.

The result during the last week of curation is the following:

List of rewarded post since 03/03/2017

Nr	Author	Title	SBD
2106	danilamarilu	📷 Henna and Jagua <brpic of the Day 📷 [Original Body Art]	7.694
2107	dezconocido	Análisis rápido del videojuego indie: Prime World Defenders	5.279
2108	keko	Paisaje urbano - La Castellana / Cityscape - La Castellana	7.112
2109	handmade	El Tango: Una mezcla de sentimientos en un danzar de 2 corazones.	8.584
2110	angielb	Mi Rutina de Belleza Facial	8.445
2111	dresden	-_ Ayer Me Mataron - 22/02/2016 _-	6.635
2112	carlaaranguren	Yo soy	7.006
2113	albert1	Budapest	1.697
2114	marieta88	5 motivos para no leer los libros del pediatra Carlos González	2.768
2115	elias15g	#9 dibujos de amigos	3.499
2116	trans-juanmi	Visita al Museo de Historia Natural de Berlin - 1 Parte.	4.589
2117	silvia24	Lover NYX make up (spanish)	8.767
2118	avelinorojas96	Te explico el significado de entender a una persona y no solo tratarla: Especial para médicos y demas	2.537
2119	nzavenezolana	¡Ser o no ser! En la vida se gana o se aprende...	2.958
2120	soyjoseluis	TIERRAS SIN TIEMPO - Dibujo by @soyjoseluis	3.092
2121	garvofe	La fascinaciones de las máquinas de deseo	3.881
2122	ivan-perez-anies	Crítica by uno de Huesca sobre Cuentos de la cripta [Tales from the crypt] Anuncio de nuevos episodios para este año!!!!	0.316
2123	hykert	Busy by important decision > I will emigrate - Ocupado por decisión Importante > Emigraré	3.303
2124	nzavenezolana	Carache, tierra de la amable libertad.	2.544
2125	angielb	Experiencias favoritas de Viajar	8.348
2126	consciadrian	Nuevo Comienzo	6.362
2127	trans-juanmi	Momias Peruanas en la Iglesia do Carmo en Lisboa.	0.379
2128	soyjoseluis	UNBOXING/DESENCAPUCHADO/REWIEV de todo un CLÁSICO - ORIGINAL by@soyjoseluis	4.979
2129	jlufer	El Vino de mi país y con qué comidas consumirlas	4.384
2130	torkot	Los Guanches	2.472
2131	danilamarilu	Como hacer un Smoothie Frutal Paso a Paso! - Original Recipe -	9.078

Summary of current witness parameters:

Price Discount: Our discount remains at 2%. The price for 1 SBD is just slightly below 1 USD but the SBD supply compared to the STEEM supply is too high (ratio is at 0.46%). The “debt” needs to be reduced and applying this price discount, will encourage the users to convert their SBD to STEEM.

SBD Interest Rate: My SBD interest rate remains unchanged at 1%. Increasing the interest rate, will increase the avaliable SBD supply and that is exactly what we would like to to avoid.

Registration Fee: My registration remains unchanged at 30 STEEM. Taking into account the actual STEEM market price, a fee of 2.86$ to open an account does not seems alot. Reducing this fee too much could result into mass creation of accounts without any existing user behind.

Some more Information.

Since the beginning of our witnessing operations the main node has been running flawless resulting on not a single missed blocked.
Given the price of the STEEM and our witness position (51 at the time of writting) we are of course not even close the break even in terms of hardware cost. We will continue to do so, since we believe that the investment will payout when the user base reach the millions. Don't forget there are 450 million native spanish speakers needing to use steem/steemit (they just dont know it yet).
We are preparing to upgrade our witness and seed node to the new version of steem engine. It is a hard fork and therefore if the majority of witness upgrade to this version, the remaining witnesses will need to update as well if they want to keep producing blocks. We also believe that the majority of the proposed changes are going to be useful for the community.
We will keep curating post thanks to our supporters.

How to contribute

If you want to contribute to the project you can do several things:

(1) Vote the spanish post recommended by us. For that, the most easy way is to follow the votes made by @cervantes. You can do it manually or you can use on of the multiple existing bots (reach us, @pgarcgo or @gargon) out in steemit.chat, channel #hispanohablantes, if you want some explanation on how to do that).
(2) You can, of course, vote this witness (@cervantes.)
(3) You can join the chanel "HispanoHablantes" in steemit.chat (be careful: only spanish is allowed; but don`t hesitate if you are learning it, we will help you)
(4) 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-coleages).

So far..

Your sincerely

Pablo @pgarcgo
and
Manu @gargon