What is a Steem Witness?

Hello,

Have you wondered what is Steem Witness on SteemIt?

Source: https://steemit.com/steem-cartoon/@sireh/steem-cartoon-the-politically-correct-speech-and-reality

What are MINERS are to Bitcoin, Steam Witnesses are to the Steem BlockChain.
Steem Witness are the miners on the Steem BlockChain.

A block by a Bitcoin miner gets added for winning the Proof Of Work puzzle.
It is completely up to the Bitcoin Miner to 'be at it' to solve the block.

To be a SteemWitnesses on SteemIt, you have to be chosen by the community who gives you a vote to be a Steem Witnesses. Steemit uses Delegated Proof of Stake consensus (DPoS) protocol.

Some salient points to reiterate before we go any further on knowing more about SteemIt Witness.

1. Online Social Networks (OSNs) have changed the way we live our lives. They helped in creating public profiles and sharing our thoughts, feelings, ideas and approaches, both private ones and public ones, with others.
2. The owners of OSNs have become 'data entrepreneurs' which are bundled together to sell advertising and other services of corporations.
3. The OSN Owners have become, more than being OSN per se, have become data architects, Data engineers and data analysts. Most of these OSNs such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram et al are Centralized OSNs, and the ownership is with the corporation.
4. The weakness of OSNs was exposed as 'privacy being a myth' by the well known business case - Cambridge Analytica.
5. With the adoption of Bitcoin and the underlying efficiency and effectiveness of Blockchain, there has been a lot of innovative approaches to create Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) and Blockchain Online Social Networks (BOSNs). SteemIt is one such BOSN. Both the DOSNs and BOSNs are owned by the community, more or less.
6. The Characteristics of a BOSN are - No Single-Point of Failure, Censorship Resistance, Economic Rewards for Valuable
   Contributions, Content Authenticity, and Truthfulness.
7. SteemIt as a BOSN has been around for quite some time, and SteemIt BlockChain has been developed on the well known Ethereum Blockchain. SteemIt is already popular with 1 million users. (If you did not hear about SteemIt before, then you were either a "Rip-Van-Winkle' or you are caught taking a NAP in the blockchain timeline ;-)).
8. SteemIt is wrongly compared to Reddit. Reddit gives an opportunity to its users to create content and curate popular content, and financially rewards these activities of a user.
9. Whereas SteemIt BOSN allows every user to be a producer, author and curator and financially rewards these activities of the user.

• And the producers of Steemit are the ones who create the blocks in the SteemIt Blockchain, the equivalent of the Miners for Bitcoin. The authors create content (and comments on the created content), for which you get allocated certain "TOKENs' which in turn gets converted into STEEM (the Currency).
• By the way, an author gets 7 days from the date of posting to edit, beyond that time a blog post can not be edited.
• The curators UPVOTE and DOWNVOTE and this activity help in identifying the most relevant, contextual and compelling content on SteemIt.

Now let's dig deeper to understand the working of Witness system in Steemit.

Steemit us the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus.
Which means that Witnesses have to vote by the users and these votes are used to rank the witnesses.

Every user has 30 votes to give.
The user can withdraw the support and can re-use that vote to vote for some other Witness candidate.
A user can give his or her VOTE to a PROXY to cast it.

For a user to be a witness, they have to maintain and operate a server to process blocks and also to manage other functions such as publishing price feed of USD/STEEM to the network.
The Witness gets rewarded 10% of the total tokens from the tokens created for publishing a new block.

There are only 21 Witnesses on SteemIt Blockchain (Not sure why is it only 21 Witness Users, I wonder!) and they also form the governing body that runs the Blockchain Consensus.

The top 19 Witnesses get to create one block every 63 seconds.
A witness is given a slot to create a block, and if they are unable to create that block, the opportunity has passed on to the next witness in the ranking.

The typical profile of a Witness user on Steemit is -they are prolific content creators, mostly relevant and contextual to SteemIt.

• They have a good number of followers.
• They too follow a good number of users.
• They are highly evaluated by the users.
• They have a huge impact on the ecosystem.
• They are the WHALEs of the Steemit blockchain.
• They drive the economic rewards and the reputation of users on Steemit.

Beyond the top ranked 19 witnesses, every ranked Witness becomes a wait listed witness. (I need validation on this).
And every wait listed witness gets to create a block, as per the DPoS consensus protocol. (I need validation on this too).

The Witness at 30 rank can create 4 blocks per hour.
The Witness at 50 rank can create one block per hour.

And non-witness user of Steemit, I would highly recommend to cast your vote to the listed Witness.
By virtue of your voting, you are being 'part of the transactions' that Witnesses do.
Let's get to it, Captain!

If you want to vote for one of the steam witnesses, you can go here.

Link to Vote: https://steemitwallet.com/~witnesses

Sources used for writing this post.
Analysis of Witnesses in the Steem Blockchain - https://d-nb.info/1234695618/34