Witness Update - November / December 2018

Dear steemians,

We have decided to post one of our witness updates in english again to show to the non-spanish speaking communities what we have doing during the last weeks. We have been several times advised to explain things more often in English in order to increase our "visibility". We agree. Specially during the last weeks where we have been hardly maintaining our position in the top 20 producing schedule and every support counts.

We have divided the post in different sections for clarity, to explain in detail the different projects or initiatives we - as a team - execute and/or support.

Seeking consensus on economic Changes.

Based on the actual implemented economic rules, Steem has become a platform "financially rewarding content indifferent voting behavior (eg. self voting, vote selling) instead of content reflective voting behavior (eg. curation)". After some discussions with witnesses and stakeholders on possible implementable solutions, we launched and published a survey to present the status of the witness "consensus". Steemit Inc supported this initiative specially since the required implemented changes could have been done a "community" development not putting "in danger" the SMT roadmap

Finally after several round of discussions and concrete proposals no consensus was found among the witness and the initiative has been dismissed for the time being.

As for today, we still believe that some changes are needed. But it it is also true, that such new economics behaviour could be possibly be tested on a specific SMT - as soon as the full SMT functionality is deployed - without needing to "experiment" on STEEM avoiding to revert the changes in a future fork if the outcome is not the one expected.

Support to community steem blockchain development.

We strongly support the idea that on the long term, the steemd core development should be maintained and founded by a non-profit organisation where the main stakeholders decides by consensus the direction the blockchain should take and also provides enough liquidity to pay the developers working for the organisation.

Today we are far for that reality and we strongly depend on Steemit Inc - which also happens to be the strongest Steem stakeholder - and remains the only realistic organisation with the necesary skills and liquidity to keep the steem core blockchain development on-going.

Nevertheless we would support as witness all initiatives (see this post by @therealwolf) regarding to build "real" steem community development infrastructure and resources (repositories, developers, documentation, testnet, etc) and more specially if the spanish speaking community is involved in this regard.

Randomly missed blocks

After several incremental buggy Softforks after HF20, the network seems to have stabilised with v.0.20.6 and we have been constantly and successfully producing blocks as part of the top20 consensus scheduled. We have tough repeatedly observed ramdom block missing events - together with top witnesses - which were reported here and here. It seems that the problem was not only latency. It was not a severe bug, but finally it seem to have been solved thanks to @anyx. We will wait for the approval by steemit inc before deploying the workaround.

Security Release v.0.20.7

We checked and installed the security release v.20.7 delivered by Steemit Inc. The patches impact only the "serialization logic" and not the format, therefore the consensus logic was not affected and the patch was possible to be applied as soft fork. As you can see in this diff the upack function is implemented recursively (a function that call itselfs) and a recursion depth parameter has been implemented with a predefined MAX_RECURSION_DEPTH of 20, posible to avoid exploits under certain de-seralizacion conditions.

Security Release v.0.20.8

After the introduction of v.0.20.7, some memory leaks where introduced which were fixed as part of this commit which derived in a increase of the RAM usage specially affecting full nodes.

Infraestructure

We are running 3 dedicated identical configured 64 GB, high speed solid stated storage producing nodes located at two different european locations controlled by two independent monitoring servers, which automatically managed the signing-key rotation in case of block missing events. We are also running a public seed node which can be reached at seed1.cervantes.one:2001. They are all now installed with the latest v.0.20.8 release.

To date, we have upvoted more than 72,499 posts granting an approximately 710,684.716 SBD in rewards in two years of work. You can look at the public data here Curated Posts. After deciding to stop 100% the selfvotes the number of posts that Cervantes and the curation accounts vote daily have increased considerably, not only in the number of posts, bus also in the % of those votes, with an average of 60-80 posts in Spanish upvoted everyday. The curation accounts keep voting six days a week, but Cervantes votes everyday, so there's no day without Spanish content being upvoted.

During the last 30 days, @cervantes has voted 586 spanish written posts, with 0% of self-votes (see life report)

To browse the posts voted by cervantes you can use this useful service offered by steempeak:

https://steempeak.com/@cervantes/trail

Our community is built around following discord server:

https://discord.gg/SnDH9Ku

This server is managed by the moderation team - lead by @loreennaa - which is responsible for:

• Resolve the doubts of the users in the doubts channel, in the general chat and in the audio channels.
• Review and clean 50 channels of promotion, warning by private message to users who violate the promotion rules, so that they promote their publications correctly.
• Choose from 6 to 7 weekly posts, to be voted by @Cervantes, taking into account the good use of channels and quality standards (these publications are voted by @Velazquez and are mentioned in the moderation report).

These are the reports written by the moderator team - including their curated content.

• Reporte de moderación [2018-12-28]
• Reporte de moderación [2018-12-20]
• Reporte de moderación [2018-12-13]
• Reporte de moderación [2018-12-06]
• Reporte de moderación [Nov. week 4]
• Reporte de moderación [Nov. week 3]
• Reporte de moderación [Nov. week 2]
• Reporte de moderación [Nov. week 1]

On November we have published fresh content made by authors who we consider talented enough to represent the Steemit ecosystem.

We have been posting about human rights of the LGTBQ community as an reflection for our society, also we wrote about physiology of fear, micro-classes on audiovisual techniques and educational content on marketing and content creation.

Here at the list of original articles with their respective authors.

• Design Thinking // Los Makers a favor de la descentralización. by @industrialvarez
• Design Thinking // La visión de Karim Rashid sobre los objetos by @industrialvarez
• Contenido Original | La esclavitud ¿realmente abolida? by @fermionico
• Contenido Original // La magía de las brujas y sus conjuros. by @adncabrera
• Audiovisual #17 // Lo necesario para grabar un proyecto musical by @kirvic-aguilera
• Design Thinking // Tendencias del diseño 2019 by @industrialvarez
• Design Thinking // Tus ideas impresas en 3 dimensiones. by @industrialvarez

On Cervantes Science 18 publications divided into two post have been made. We currently have 6 active collaborators in the different areas. We are currently in the energy Life . We are organizing new work teams. These are the volumes published during the last month

• Cervantes Ciencia// Especial Navidad Vol. 22 p. 2-2 Christmas special
• Cervantes Ciencia// Especial Navidad Vol 22 p. 1/2 Christmas special part 1
• Cervantes Ciencia// Serie Vida Vol. 21 pt 2-2 An overview about what to expect in 2030
• Cervantes Ciencia//Vida Vol.21 p.1/2 Human body and how it interact with what is around us.
• Cervantes Ciencia// Vida Vol 20. p 2/2 Post focused on drought and tools to fight it
• Cervantes Ciencia//Vida Vol. 20 p. 1/2. In this edition of Cervantes Ciencias you will find information about vitamin D and sunlight, The QR codes, as well as certain nutrition and wellness recommendations.
• Cervantes Ciencia// Serie Vida. Vol.19 pt 2/2 In this edition you will find information about some technological releases, the ethics of Science and the Ingenium in road works.
• Cervantes Ciencia// Serie Vida. Vol.19 pt1/2 In Cervantes Ciencias, on the occasion of the celebration of Halloween we bring in this edition some horror articles: The physiology of the skeletal system "beautiful from the skeleton", The nomophobia and the mobile telephone and liquefaction of the soils.
• Cervantes Ciencia// Serie de energía. Vol.18 pt 2/2 In this publication you will find the models of the empiricism thinking, rationalist or idealist will be covered in a test. The environmental values and the scholar backpack vs. the back of our children are part of this presentation.
• Cervantes Ciencia// Serie de energía. Vol.18 pt1/2 We begin the series Life. "Why do we choose sugary foods?", Sustainability from our homes, A holistic view of Science, the Phubbing and Mobile Technology, Reservoirs and Scientific cinema.

Cervantes is promoting its activities through different social networks in order to increase our visibility to the "outside world":

• Twitter account: https://twitter.com/cervantesteemit
• Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/cervantesteem/
• Youtube main: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWmy9c-Zh9EATTpN4nlS1dQ
• youtube hisparadio: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwzDt7HZmIRmu97LgcQgpHg

The agents of Lince in charge of the education of the proper use of the platform Steemit are constantly working to find publications in Spanish that are missing to the General Rules of Coexistence, to leave them a comment education and then report it in the server channel of Discord.

In this time we managed to decrease the amount of users that were using images from other pages, without adding a source owner or website where he got it. With the educational work of see the difference in those users to give credit to the original owner of the image used, something productive because it means that not only is creating publications and reporting to users, we are changing behaviors and mindsets, misconceptions of the users that is mostly due to ignorance of the proper use of the Blockchain.

The communities come to our channel of Discord to inform us when there is any irregularity with a user or a publication in a specific, suspected plagiarism, or abuse of content. Our work as agents of Lince is to meet those needs and have managed to detect users who committed plagiarism of publications, causing it to lose the votes of communities, but our work is accomplished to avoid these problems, and to undertake the curation are outstanding and do not support a user that is committing acts of plagiarism.

We have been presenting 79 users since we started with this promotion project. We have made a post about the first 50 users.(https://steemit.com/cervantes/@cervantes/cervantes-presenta-celebrando-los-primeros-50-usuarios en la fecha 11/08/2018)

Now we are on the way to promote a 100 users, on november we did 8 Cervantes presents. Those people who are actively involved on Discord are the chosen ones to be promote. For more info visit this document

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X1jZk16fynU_yx8V_hP43cGaOcz-0f4dtb7WyUptZYk/edit?usp=sharing

On Cervantes Discord there is a channel where u can see the winners: #cervantes-presenta

• The Chat Rooms in the Cervantes' Discord was created:
  • Chat room open to the public, to help users interested in this project.
  • The promotion room is been created for links promotion We proceeded to establish contact with first users interested in the project.
• Publications were made in Steemit describing the activities of the project.
• A publication was made introducing the moderator of the project and explaining what are the activities carried out in the “Proyecto Embajadores”, as well as an invitation to users who are interested in becoming involved in the project.
• Another publication was made in Steemit explaining the progress made, who can be an ambassador and what an ambassador should do. New calls were made to users interested in participating in the project.
• Activities have been created for ambassadors, and ambassadors have been selected as the project has progressed.

As long as we are top witness we are delegating 2k SP every month to spanish independent projects in order to keep helping the spanish community growth. Currently we are in position #20

So far we have delegated 26K

These are the delegated projects so far and their activities:

@radiosteemit

Cervantes delegates marks the growth of our radio together with our loyal followers. In the course of this month a more united community has been consolidated by the undertaking of new activities such as RadioGames and our challenges, offering better votes and rewards as well as new collaborations. We continue betting on the users that day after day participate in our activities promoting entertainment, writing and reading, merging Steemit and discord. Our votes are half gone for our loyal followers ... 25% are taken to collaborations with communities with similar purposes and another 25% stay in the team reinforcing the payments.

@templo

@templo curation project with 8,9k delegation by the witness @cervantes had an exponential growth allowing us to vote about 30 daily post, thats about 900 monthly post, allowing as well to distribute the votes in different topics and categories:

• Mondays for travel and culture.
• Tuesdays for Cinema and Music.
• Wednesdays for photography.
• Thursdays for a mix content.
• Fridays for Literature.
• Saturdays for Art.
• Sunday for Nature & Pets.

We have created some new activities, we had lunched some Contest to help the users to get visibility to their blogs, so from our @templo ArtUniverse´s Contest was the first one dedicated to digital and manual drawings. The second contest was about writing ( poetry, prose, narrative)...The third contest which is now ongoing is about photography and the fourth contests we have launched is about to help new users to grow on the platform, and learn learn how to increase their SP.

@repollo

Repollo Curations:

With the 4,400 SP delegated by @cervantes to @repollo we have voted 10 posts daily, in average, with different percentages, giving $3 daily with our TRAIL in rewards. We have launched a section to vote high quality content (art, design music, photography) at 100% which represents $0.55 in today’s values.

Curation Rewards:

Thanks to the delegation our curation rewards have increased in 70% and we have decided to stop doing Power Down starting 2019 so we can reach 500 SP with Repollo. When @cervantes delegated to us we had only 200SP. now we have 380 SP.

@celfmagazine

We are pleased to continue to count on the delegation and support of witness cervantes, and we are sure that with the great work they are doing they will remain as top witness on behalf of the Hispanic community.

In November we have upvoted approximately 200 articles, giving an average of 6 daily articles. We have consolidated our curation team and started working on initiatives related to content creation.

@mayvileros

The @mayvileros community for the end of November and beginning of the month of December, lowered considerably the massive support to the different users of Steemit due to the abrupt fall that had the crypto currencies and the constant failures with the service of Internet in our country Venezuela. We went from supporting 15-18 post daily to 5-8 post. However, we continue to support, motivate and teach new users who are entering the platform.

We could estimate that we have been able to support a number of 125 different users over 12 days corresponding to the date of November and the first 5 days of December.

@steemitvenezuela

To date we have carried out the following curation work by the @steemitvenezuela community.

• 20 articles curated and voted the [1st week of November]
• 18 articles curated and voted on [2nd week of November](https://steemit.com/spanish/@steemitvenezuela/comunidad-hispana-al-dia-reporte-de-curacion-de-la-segunda-semana-de-noviembre).
• 22 articles curated and voted [4th week of November](https://steemit.com/steemitvenezuela/@steemitvenezuela/reporte-de-cure-la-4ta-semana-de-november-se-se-se-sex-curanderos)
• 1st part of 20 articles curated and voted on [1st week of December](https://steemit.com/spanish/@steemitvenezuela/report-de-cure-de-la-1era-semana-de-december-se-sex-curanderos)
• 2nd part of 20 articles curated and voted articles healed and voted [1st week of December](https://steemit.com/steemitvenezuela/@steemitvenezuela/communidad-hispana-al-dia-report-de-curacion-1era-semana-de-diciembre-2018).
• Part 3 of 20 posts curated and voted items healed and voted [December 1](https://steemit.com/steemitvenezuela/@steemitvenezuela/Hispanic-community-to-day-health-report-1ra-week-december-2018).

Special curation. We have developed a method™, which allows _future curators_ to perform a curation of 10 - 20 posts before being considered by the _SteemitVenezuela_ community board of directors. In this way some of this procedures have been carried out in these two months: 1. Curation of 20 articles carried out by @erickyoussif who is already part of the healing team. 2. Curation of 20 articles carried out by @wilkeny who, if approved, will be part of the healing team.

It's a total of approximately: 160 posts cured in this couple of months.

@engranaje

Last week @cervantes delegated 2k SP to this curation project for spanish content which is been around long enough and shown a very good work ethic and commitment

During the last month we have produced following educational podcasts.

• Dudas Sobre Steem - 02.12.2018. @loreennaa answer questions about Steem, SBD, debt ration and implications of the 10% haircut
• Podcast de Filosofía - 02.12.2018. @ivymalifred talks about "Living with consecuences"
• Simplemente Sexual - 04.12.2018. @sexoycolor talks about "Infidelity"
• Dudas sobre Steemit - 06.12.2018: @loreennaa talks about different useful tools.
• Podcast de Filosofía - 07.12.2018. @ivymalifred talks about "Law: Justice or domination"
• Podcast Emociones y Relaciones - 07.12.2018: @maria-alejandra talks about "Depression"
• Pocast Cervantes Ciencia - 07.12.2018. @alexaivytorres talks about "Physiology of the jealousy"

During the last months we have produced at hisparadio following podcasts:

• Steemit Habla - 02.12.2018. Guest: @pgarcgo. We talk about the latest steemit Ínc. latest announcements,
• Live Curation - 22.11.2018: With one of our curators @rafarosado.
• Steemit Habla - 18.11.2018: Guest: Proyecto @repollo
• Steemit Habla - 11.11.2018: Guest: @jza
• Steemit Habla - 04.11.2018: Guests: @pgarcgo talks about Destinity and Steemmosters

Preparation of first post, presentation Development and production of the first life show in discord audio and general chat to interact with users. Main topic: Interview with @pgarcgo about Steemfest. Cast of 10 Steem prize, won by @elelobos. Game proposal through the general chat. Development of the second program. Main topic: interview with @pgarcgo about frequently asked questions in Steemit. Again a game will be made through the chat.

Thanks to @steempress - the awesome wordpress plugin provide by @howo and @fredrikaa - we have setup a independent domain that will be using to post content with out steem account. This can be reached under:
http://cervantes.one/wordpress

Steem is been around for a long time already and it has changed the life of thousands.

We are dealing here with one of the best blockchains on the crypto space which is continuing improving. Bear in mind that nowadays blockchain engineers are very rare to find. Some of the best are working on steem.

We have been through rough times and trough euphoria times. We all know the feeling.

One thing we can say with absolute confidence: no bear market is going to destroy Steem or our amazing mixed community

If you feel @cervantes is doing enough as a witness vote for us.

https://steemit.com/~witnesses

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://cervantes.one/wordpress/index.php/2018/12/28/witness-update-november-december-2018/

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