2017 was weird year, but hey first things first, after so much wait, on December 28th MArlene was born, with 47cm and 2450 gms, all is good, she's too cool, cute and tiny.
Her brother likes her and since this afternoon we are all back home reunited to recieve the new year!
The machine
The server is working great and even thought we have realized lately the size of the block-chain is growing exponentially, and there is no real reason for this because steemit has not grown that much, the block-chain size has increased about 4Gb lately and 2 of those gigabytes have been very fast...
No missed blocks, 3 new blocks witnessed
Anyway the server is sitting in position 129, just before 
...not exactly last, because there are in theory 14000 witnesses, and i am 129, that must be an honor, even more, if you count disabled witnesses i fall into position 97
The projects and the community
Reveur discord
A thriving venezuelan community to cultivate real steemians, "Come for the vote, stay for the good vibes" we organize every week 1 or 2 Live Curation events as well as a weekly Crypto-market basics, introduction
The market sessions have become a hangout to explain steemit.I made a nice discord BOT to manage the channel which has proven very sucessful... it cleans all channels from post links and drops'em in a promote channel (had to do that, people were just entering the server and pasting their bloody link on every channel they could... (it is me or that is rude?)
Free vote Intelligent BOT
If you paid attention, about 2 months ago i made a big fuss about the BOT i coded with a Artificial Intelligence neural network to encourage selflessnes in steemit and allow minnows to feel what giving a vote was. Also was looking for support to fund it... Guess what... I WORKS :) People doesn't like it because they are used to stupid BOTs that give money for free for no apparent reason or to pay for votes, because that is what #steemit has shown them we expect from them.
So when faced to a BOT that request to be generous and not to call a self vote but a to vote on other people posts, that are not bound by curation groups TAGs and the encourage to use free tags that really serve to categorize content and not to call for votes... Well they are confused when the BOT just ignores them... But a few (and those are the ones who matter) have done the effort to figure out how to better use the BOT and that must be rewards enough.
For a test period the bot ignored requests from people who has not voted for any witness... had to remove it, 93% of the callers didn't met that condition...
A new feature will be rolled soon, Verification of the sumoner SP and VP and if has voted in the post... This is to ensure if people with high SP is using it either they have voted the post and are just giving more rewards to the author or their VP is low and they used the BOT... I mean there is no sense in giving my vote if you are not giving yours.
Another feature that i am working on is to refuse to vote when there has been a pay for vote service used in the post (if one has the money to pay for a vote, then leave the free votes for those who wont)
Let's have minnows curating! (delega)
Ahh... this one i love it because it teaches me so much about steemit.
I raised 14 SBD to rent small amounts of SP to give as delegations for free to minnows, some venezuelans donated additional 3 SBD, some i sold before the pump, some after, and i got 70 steem ready to pay for the delegations... I tried several approaches and guess what...
Too long without a picture of my new born, this time with her brother!
Still got the money there my requests, on the MB site, begging on the chats, and others were not met, so i since i made a commitment to delegate my wife accepted to delegate for free to:
The 4 of them are working hard at the discord and are curating and have plenty of good ideas and hopes.
Communal trading account
I transfered 500 usd to a bittrex account handled bythe idea is to do day trading and generate some money to fuel the projects so i'm not the only one funding this.
I am worried, because he is a XVG-fanboy and is expecting his lambo this year, lets hope he sells before the next dump as he would have doubled the money :)
In any case the deal is that all consolidated earnings after the 1000 Usd$ mark will be split the following way:
| 10% the trader (him) | 20% the wild capitalist (me) | 70% finance projects |
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I am hoping this will help keep building the #venezuela community on steemit
The human witness
I have been campaigning since the start of my intent looking for the support of stake-holders that beleive that adoption and retention are key issues to address to allow for the growth of the platform, but sadly apparently the ones that think alike, are like myself and have a modest stake in here, I keep looking for support to my witness intent, I applied as MSP PAL witness a few weeks ago, but i am guessing i was not selected.
Also, a week ago I lost the vote of my bigger voter, he told me: just moving around (I don't blame you bro, but whatever i need to tell my self, the truth is that 161 persons have believed in my projects and my little contributions to the social aspect of steem block-chain are important.
I am grateful for this and for your support.
But i would encourage everyone of my voters to support some witness with proyects that have a future, let's be honest, 99.9% of the stakeholders, have decided my proposal it is not interesting... And have chosen to support more important projects from more reliable witness.
Having failed to raise interest or support from the 1% is the reason i am up there next to last
I could use this image from @drakos list to tell myself i am one of the real top 100...
In any case, these last 4 months have shown me that my approach to Steem is not the one the stake-holders are looking for, and knowing that, it doesn't makes much sense i insist trying to become a steem witness.
Actually these months have proven that it is not sustainable to have steem as a day job, and therefore I will soon retire my witness intent (the server is paid for a few more months, so this will happen once i find use for the server).
I am sorry to disappoint the people who believed in my ways, but i have come to realize that to do my projects i don't need to be a witness and the support i am receiving is not because i run a reliable server hosted in a proper datacenter, with the right specs... So lets leave others that space.
The global community
Something we have realized is that a big number of the spanish community has been looking at 
On a side note according to 
Jerry aside, I think in most emerging countries, steem will create a flood of gold diggers and unless we take the time and invest the ressources to educate them, we will just have the usual wave of abusers that will leave once caught, this doesn't seem to matter, since Steemit INC seems to only count success in number of accounts created and not in real users earning steem or investing in steem...
The conclussion
Steem is facing a problem in which the SP and the VP reaching minnows is dammed, only paid for votes and the odd random vote gets to the new comers, so people finds normal to pay to have preference to receive their allocation of the rewards pool... This sounds to me like government handouts given by private parties (It almost sounds like french bureaucracy)
The 1 percenter stake-holders seem to think this is the right approach because they are only looking at their short term earnings (since they cannot trade tokens frozen in SP).
This will lead to manipulation to keep messing with the system to increase the revenue of the one percenters and ignore the root problem which is growth...
I see that from my next to last position and can't understand it, which leads me to think i am utterly wrong in my views and to question my vision of how a social network thrives...
So it is time for me to step back and re-think my approach, but then, one last picture... to remind me why i am dropping to half time steem block-chain employee.
Don't take me wrong, this is not a rant. I am actually quite happy!
I would like to give a especial thanks, and mention to the 3 persons who are supporting 
THANK YOU !
In the name of the Venezuelan steemians that make
Also there are two people i want to mention as we have spent endless hours chatting and imagining solutions... A big thanks to Terry ( 
To the bright, brilliant guy that 
Shall 2018 brings us millions of steemians like them !
Sorry if i am forgetting someone (there is plenty of brilliant people around)
So that is all for now...
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Don't vote for me as witness
Use your vote with people who really matters, like:
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And if i can suggest to support this guy 
(we have something in common, we are south american witnesses, this might mean there is no STAKE in our side of the spanish language... so if hablas español, then fucking invest in STEEM (but wait for the korean dump)