Becoming a Steem Witness?

in #steemit7 years ago

Steem Witness-.jpg

What is a Steem witness? Would you like me to learn and teach the steps to become a Steem witness? View current Steem witnesses at https://steemd.com/witnesses.

In summary, Steem witnesses are part of an amazing system for the Steem blockchain which saves massive amounts of energy versus the competitive nature of mining Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurriences. Instead of allowing many machines to work on making a block and rewarding the winner with payouts influenced by hashing power contributed, the Delegated Proof-of-Stake system Steem uses allows a small amount of trusted servers to produce each block as explained in detail at https://bitshares.org/technology/delegated-proof-of-stake-consensus/.

To paraphrase with my limited introductory level of understanding, the critical tasks needed such as determining who should make the next block in the blockchain, when it should be made, and which transactions to include are determined by the witnesses that handle the calculations. Witness are elected by votes by members of the community in much the same way posts are upvoted where the more "stake" which for Steem is the Steem Power you have, the more influence your vote has on the witness level. When witnesses consistently perform well, their approval rating remains high and they are paid at the compensation level they ask for. If witnesses take actions stakeholders disapprove of from going offline to missing blocks and more, voters can reduce the approval limiting the amount the witness can contribute.

Witnesses are a position of great trust because the servers they maintain literally are handling the critical transactions for Steem. As the transactions for Steem grow, we are likely to need more witnesses to continue to maintain and build our blockchain. Being a top 20 witness currently seems to be profitable because each time a block is completed by that witness nearly once a minute, the witness gets a fee which appears to add up to hundreds of dollars or more a day. Becoming a witness seems fairly challenging even if you have technical experience with Ubuntu Linux and can afford to setup the server because outside of being a top 20 witness, the payments appear to be maybe 1% to 5% of what the top 20 receive meaning it might actually cost thousands of dollars to start being a witness and last long enough to make it into the top 20. Actually getting into the top 20 as a Steem witness appears to require a rare combination of both technical ability and community service dependent on communication, networking, and even marketing skills in campaigning for votes.

Would you like me to continue to learn more about becoming a witness, document each step I take as I get my servers online, and launch my campaign for votes because I am in a great position to do all of that? Learning about each step is exciting for me and our generosity gives me the opportunity to do everything without the need to turn a profit for the foreseeable future while creating educational resources to empower more new Steem witnesses.

As I have been learning about Steemit, I see one of our possible weak points is the witness system. If we get viral growth, we might have a hard time keeping up with expanding the witnesses to match it. If a few of the top witnesses go offline due to hacking, natural disasters, or anything unexpected such as the crash of the Steem price removing the profitability for a foreseeable future in maintaining even a top position, we are vulnerable to not have a critical mass of backup witnesses capable of providing reliable service which then could cause everything to come crashing down. Attrition in the top 100 witnesses is surprisingly high with many of those having served when Steem was originally launched now offline and newer witnesses already in the top 20 which has expanded from the top 19 it was before. With the amount of votes and effort it appears to take to reach the top 20, the more people willing to make the effort to be a non-top 20 witness, the more resilient our network is in the face of any challenges to our witness system.

If you would like me to take the next critical steps of starting my server setup, would you help me to become a Steem witness in whatever way is best for you with an upvote and/or helpful comments with tips here because with just researching it now, I still do not know most of what I need to in order to be a witness. If you are confident our witness system is already rock solid going forward and think I would be better off using my time to do something else which would serve our community better, would you please let me know that in a comment with more resources for me to see how deep our witness system is and suggestions for what I should do instead?

My initial plan to become a witness is to build Ubuntu Linux servers at home and document the process to help other users do the same because this will give me the lowest cost solution overall give that I have 300 mbs upload and download on my internet with the ability to upgrade I think to 500/500. That said, I might need to use a VPS if the terms and conditions of Frontier (formerly Verizon Fios) are not friendly towards me hosting a server like this at home or if it is questionable whether I can maintain the security of my entire system this way. I have read posts providing ups and downs on both approaches some of which have suggested using an alternate account to begin in case of losing access or getting the test account hacked. If you know a lot about this, would you please help guide me as to what you recommend especially if you are a top 20 witness? I have ranked the top 20 as of today below in case they follow their tags as I do and to help you get to know them!

What are my greatest assets for becoming a witness? I can afford to set everything up without needing a profit perhaps ever and teach others exactly how I did it with a combination of free video tutorials and paid video courses showing every single step in full detail. If I can effectively become a Steem witness, it should inspire many others to try also!

What are my greatest limitations? I have almost no experience with Linux although I have used command line interfaces as far back as fifth or sixth grade and am very excited to learn the basis of Ubuntu Linux to allow me to setup the servers. I am fairly certain I can watch video courses combined with following the steps to get up to speed fairly quickly. While I am known online for my hacking tutorials in partnership with Ermin Kreponic, I personally have very little hands on experience with networking and IT security. After all the videos I have watched and the in depth tutorials available, I am confident I can setup and maintain a secure server.

Here are the links I have visited so far in my research and I am very grateful each poster took the time to share in detail what to do to become a Steem witness because these posts gave me the courage to try. I am certain I have missed lots more which I will be looking for immediately after posting this. Would you please share any helpful links I have missed outside of those shared in these guides in the comments to help me research faster?

  1. https://steemit.com/steemit-guides/@pfunk/a-full-steemit-user-s-guide-to-steem-witnesses
  2. https://steemit.com/steemhelp/@steemed/become-a-steem-witness-essentials
  3. https://steem.io/documentation/how-to-mine/
  4. https://steemit.com/witness-category/@klye/the-complete-noob-guide-to-steem-witness-setup

Who are the top 20 Witnesses as of June 18, 2017?

  1. @roelandp
  2. @gtg
  3. @furion
  4. @bhuz
  5. @anyx
  6. @good-karma
  7. @pharesim
  8. @jesta
  9. @timcliff
  10. @wackou
  11. @clayop
  12. @xeldal
  13. @klye
  14. @roadscape
  15. @witness.svk
  16. @abit
  17. @pfunk
  18. @arhag
  19. @riverhead
  20. @thecryptodrive

Thank you very much for reading this post! Will you help me decide with your votes and comments what to do next with my idea for becoming a Steem Witness?

Love,
Jerry Banfield

Sort:  

Hi @jerrybanfield, I'm a new follower of yours and I see that you've got a lot of influence and some pretty good advice for a poor crypto noob like me. Although probably your most endearing quality is the love you have for our community, it's a love I share and this platform has given me some amazing friends and opportunities since I joined a week ago. I have a lot of friends who are witnesses and I highly suggest you speak with @timcliff, @ausbitbank, and @theprophet0 in discord or steemitchat regarding any questions you may have!

If you would like any help getting on the discord channels I can supply you with the links or try to see if they are free to talk to you!

I just joined a week ago as well and getting used to this platform is not difficult at all. You seem to be very active in the community and knowledgeable! Hope @jerrybanfield sees your comment :)

Thanks Jerry!

Very good post, i love when you said in a yt video, Jerry none of these posts are short-_-
Love, from sweden

I will vote for you and I'm excited to learn with you sir! I have dreamt about what it would take to become a witness, and you are indeed in a superb spot to be able to do it! Best of luck Jerry!

What is Witnessing exactly drpuffnstuff, is it the same as staking?

No it's like being a miner. But you elected into a certain position based on staking power. Staking power on here is I guess your ability to upvote and curate posts to make steem/sbd, to make steem/sbd.. open your bar on the top right, find witnesses and you can vote for 30 of them. Look up posts about witnesses, pick the ones you like.. like Jerry banfield for example! You will see some names you recognize in the witness list when you look and figure it out

Oh cool, can I vote for you @drpuffnstuff ??

No, only people running witness nodes. Someday

I think witnesses are one of the least understood aspects of steemit. I know in the month I've been here, it's been the hardest thing for me to get my head around in terms of who to vote for.

That said, some of the witnesses (I'm sure others are as well) are doing some really great things. The Minnow Support Project was founded by witnesses @aggroed, @ausbitbank and @teamsteem. It is something I've become involved with and it's been really rewarding in terms of getting to know other steemers while giving my work greater exposure. It's also changed my focus and taken me in a direction I was not expecting when I joined.

I'm sure you would bring something great to the witness role as well Jerry, if it's something you decide to pursue.

I have voted for witnesses but indeed it is not very clear to users what these witnesses are about and why it is so important for users to vote for witnesses. There is an information disparity here.

hahahaha awesome @jerrybanfield
but to be honest without the slightest idea of how to work on a shell
you better hire someone to do it. what are you doing when under attack?
no chance ;-)

the funny thing here is, a lot of people screaming YES have my vote... they don't even
understand what you was talking about haha
but i can understand the hype here ^^

so keep going and try it, wanna see how it ends up :-)

No one would be better. You had my vote at "Would". 😂

I would vote for you Jerry. Find out what you need to do!

Jerry thanks for the post! always good to see you here
Resteemed Upvoted as always!

"With the amount of votes and effort it appears to take to reach the top 20, the more people willing to make the effort to be a non-top 20 witness, the more resilient our network is in the face of any challenges to our witness system"
Seriously ?Im pretty sure it still doesn't do anything to minnows.
We would love to know more about it Jerry , thanks for sharing this .
Always informative 😉

Thank you jerry for your great info, we learn a lot from you, You're the man !!
Steemit to the moon !! :)