What Are Steem Witnesses and what have they done?
What are witnesses and what have they done?
There's a lot of mixed information on Steemit as to what a witness does, they are a person who operates a server, which produces blocks and publishes a price feed of Steem tokens to Us Dollars.
Steemit is a social platform powered by a decentralized blockchain called Steem. Steem is based on graphene which is powering Bitshare also. It's delegated proof of stake blockchain which work are different to another consensus to finding algorithms, like Bitcoin proof of work and other coins with proof of stake. Not every stakeholder or participant takes part in the block producting process. Only a selected few which are voted by the stakeholders. The witnesses are basically the ones securing the blockchain, managing your transactions and making a consensus between different node. You can run your own note but you will always get your data from the witnesses.
Basically, the witnesses are like governors of the federal reserve system. Witnesses secure the blockchain that means that they collectively decide on the version of Steemit is running and where Steemit will go. If developers or somebody else comes up with an idea. Like changing the setting which requires a hard fork and the basics of the chain like how SBD are created. Another word, the developers are kind of like the mayor wants to change something and you guys the city council, can either say yes or no.
The witnesses also expected to provide an ongoing price feed of Steem tokens in U.S. dollars. The witnesses are generally voted for because they are trusted members of the community. Witnesses are expected to keep a block-producing Steem node running 24 hrs a day and 7 days a week. They are rewarded for their services and running their node by getting powered up by one Steem for each block they produce. They create the Steem blockchain in real time every 3 seconds. Every 63 second, we are trusting the top 20 witnesses to produce one block for us. The top 50 witnesses from 21 to 50 produce blocks every hour to every minute. How much they get paid? They get roughly 1400 SP per day. Per month they get roughly 42,500 SP and per year they get about 510,000 SP
Here are the top witnesses
Voting
They get voted in by people like us. It's just like an election if you don't vote, other people may vote in witnesses who are malicious or simply unreliable. They are paid to how high they are in the witness ranks. You can vote to approve a witness. When you've decided to vote, go to Steemit's top witnesses page find their account and vote. Your account is limited to approving 30 witness accounts. https://steemd.com/witnesses
Can anyone become a witness?
The answer is: The answer is YES
To become a witness, you require these steps.
- You must have trust from the community
- A powerful and reliable server
- A powerful server with excellent bandwidth to operate Steem
- Creating a signing key then broadcasting your intent to become a witness
- An accurante price feed of Steem to USD which is updated once a day
- You should understand most Steem concepts
Upvote and Comment below for your chance to win some SBD. The winner will be announced on my next post Thank you and good luck!
The winner of my last post is @wanderlass
Hi @vaansteam, thank you so much for explaining what witnesses are in such plain English. I understood it at my first reading. Normally it takes me two three times to go throw the post to fully understand as I am new in this crypto currency field and as a new Steemien. I already voted 3 people for being witness but didn’t know then what they are. Thank god , I didn’t utilize all of my 30 voting power. Will check their profile more carefully in the future before voting more. Thank you for the post , will look forward to read more post from you. Going to read your previous posts as well.
Thank you for your awesome comment. It was my pleasure! I'm glad you took the time to vote for the witness. Hope you do well on this platform! Have a wonderful day!
I'm new to crypto too, and I don't even know what a block is. Could you or @vaansteam explain? Other than that, the rest I think I understand -- great article!
A blockchain is a technology invented in 2008 to power bitcoin. HOw it work is a block is a record of new transactions, that could mean the location of cryptocurrency, or medical data, or even voting records, creating a chain of blocks which is a blockchain. @sungazer
What a wonderful explanation! The very best I've seen since I've been here.
Witnesses are vitally important to Steemit. Right now they are facing a pretty epic question regarding the allocation of bandwidth to the platform as a whole and to the blockchain specifically. There are several options, and somebody isn't going to like what ever they decide. But it must be done and I for one am incredibly glad that we have freely elected stakeholders involved in the process.
That’s really nice you to say. I tried to make it clear as possible because there’s a lot of mixed information out there. Thank you for pointing that out, very useful information:)
I can see how important it is now to vote for a witness but I don't even know what a good witness looks like. How do I know if the witness is competent in what they do?
A good witness is trusted by the community, someone who been around for awhile. They should have good reputation and always willing to help others!
Hey@vaansteam! Thank you for this post, it's cleared up a lot of unclarity in my mind about what Witnesses do, excellent! Thank you for following, upvoted and following. :) Peace.
Your welcome, hope all is well! @fiercewarrior
@vannstream, I really appreciate your posts. THey are always clear, concise and helpful! Big thumbs up.
Thank you for being very positive as always :)
thank you for clearing things up awesome cheers
Not a problem my friend! Cheers @deniguerrera
I saw steem witness on someone's post but didn't have any idea what it meant, thank you for this explanatory post.
I hope i made it clear for you :) @chiama
Yes you did
🙂
Hmm, this is what I've been looking for. I've been asking around about the main purposes of these witnesses. Thank you for sharing this info @vaansteam
You’re very welcome, glad I can help @beverlyjoe
By my understanding, the Steemit platform is large enough such that there is the need for a set of people to manage the affairs and that's what the witnesses do.
Your statement here explains it all.
Thanks for educating.
You’re very welcome! Thank you for pointing that out. @rharphelle :)
nice
Thanks