Who are our top 20 witnesses? How has each helped build our community here on Steem? Our top 20 witnesses are producing 95% of our Steem blockchain every 63 seconds! We choose with our witness votes who gets to produce each block at https://steemit.com/~witnesses. Witness votes are the most important we make on Steem for maintaining our community and directing our future because the top 20 witnesses decide which hardforks to accept, maintain the servers that do all of what we usually call "mining" and receive about 250 Steem power every day as a reward for service. In writing about our top witnesses, my hope is to say thank you to each top 20 witness and to increase witness voter participation by making it easier to get to know all of our active witnesses!

Part 1 of this post series reviewed the top 10 witnesses at https://steemit.com/witness/@jerrybanfield/meet-steem-s-top-10-witnesses while this will review the next 20 witnesses and future posts will go through the remaining active witnesses! Thank you very much to @lexiconical for doing the research to make this post possible because most of the writing about each witness comes from @lexiconical's research combined with my edits prior to publishing. I also wrote this introduction and the conclusion below the research as well as producing the video which introduces each of these top witnesses to my Facebook page and YouTube channel ! @Lexiconical will receive all the SBD from this post in exchange for his contribution which saved me hours of research.

Meet Steem's Top 20 Witnesses!

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Option 1: Watch the 36 minute YouTube video for the full experience on witnesses 11 - 20!

Option 2: ~ Read the post below!

#1 - #10 https://steemit.com/witness/@jerrybanfield/meet-steem-s-top-10-witnesses

#11 - @Anyx

Anyx is the owner and operator of the venerable @cheetah, a plagiarism-stalking predator that we have all come across (hopefully not on our own posts.) Cheetah has saved @lexiconical substantial time in googling plagiarized content for authenticity, so for that I say thank you, Anyx and Cheetah.

Fun fact about @cheetah: Its proprietary AI is actually expensive to run on a recurring basis! It wouldn’t hurt to give Cheetah the occasional upvote when you see it.

Anyx founded and continues to lead the @SteemCleaners initiative, which works relentlessly to clean up all forms of abuse on the Steemit platform, such as spam, plagiarism, and post-stealing/identity theft. @steemcleaners is also the #2 author today on Steem at https://steemwhales.com/trending/?d=30 with publishing two reports each day.

When Anyx has time, he primarily posts about travel and photography. His Chicago series has been particularly popular. (My personal favorite was the Lincoln Park Zoo post. )

Anyx is a Peerplays Witness.

Anyx is holding 27,000 SP and is currently powering down.

Anyx’s Current Witness + Cheetah Update Thread: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@anyx/anyx-cheetah-and-steemcleaners-witness-update-2017-06-14
Anyx’s Original Witness Thread: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@anyx/witness-application-anyx
Anyx’s Zoo Post: https://steemit.com/photography/@anyx/chicago-part-6-lincoln-park-zoo-continued

#12 - @Xeldal

Xeldal has a wide variety of skills, so much so that @lexiconical thinks of him as our witness “swiss army knife.” He has worked as an electronics engineer, as well as both a software and user-interface developer. His work includes “high-dollar government contracts”, and he is also a registered financial adviser with experience in fund management..

In addition to such white-collar pursuits, Xeldal has also worked in the military, where he specialized in electronics. According to his original witness thread, he handled “various electronics maintenance/troubleshooting/calibration/repair tasks.”

It’s probably safe to say Xeldal is one of our most “MacGuyver-like” witnesses. Whether that means he can construct a working 2-seat plane out of duct tape, bamboo, trash bags and a cemet mixer remains to be seen.

For “fun” (used loosely with proper attribution), Xeldal develops and deploys arbitrage bots on the Bitshares and Steem exchanges.

Xeldal pointed out early that keeping Steem at 100% inflation (a situation that no longer persists) would create perpetual downward pressure on the price and discourage investment.

Perhaps Xeldal’s greatest asset is his extensive experience in witnessing. He is a full Bitshares Witness, (#16,) and a witness on the Muse blockchain with over 3 years of experience witnessing.

Xeldal holds 940,000 SP and is NOT powering down, demonstrating substantial faith in Steemit long-term.

Xeldal’s Current Witness Update: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@xeldal/xeldal-witness-information
Xeldal’s Original Witness Thread: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@xeldal/xeldal-witness-post
Xeldal’s 100% Inflation Post: https://steemit.com/steem/@xeldal/the-price-of-steem-will-always-go-down-it-s-supposed-to-the-magic-of-steem-power

#13 - @Blocktrades

Blocktrades is one of our more mysterious witnesses, and the information you get depends on who you ask.

Blocktrades is a “market-making” website founded in 2015 by Dan Notestein. Effectively, it is an exchange that you can send one cryptocurrency to, and receive an instantaneous (network speed permitting) output of another cryptocurrency for a small fee. Think of it as a digital currency exchanger where you don’t have to hold a balance to exchange.

The most well-known community function of Blocktrades is for buying Steem. Blocktrades serves as probably the most user-friendly way to buy Steem directly - all you need is the ability to send one of the supported currencies, like Bitcoin or Litecoin. I have personally used the service numerous times and it’s a great option for purchasing Steem if you wish to bypass an exchange. I have a full tutorial at https://steemit.com/blocktrades/@jerrybanfield/fast-steem-sbd-exchanges-with-bitcoin-ethereum-and-litecoin-on-blocktrades.

Blocktrades has been involved in a wide variety of market-making activities in the past, including the buying and selling of accounts with large mined stakes.

Blocktrades’ voting standards and motivations remain a mystery to the unconnected observer, which in this particular case, includes yours truly.

Blocktrades is a sponsor of the Steemit Poker League.

Blocktrades holds a massive 3.65 Million SP and is NOT powering down, demonstrating substantial faith in Steemit long-term. Blocktrades is one of the largest holders of Steem, overall.

Blocktrades’ Current Witness Update: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@blocktrades/witness-report-for-blocktrades-for-last-week-of-august
Blocktrades Steem Support: https://steemit.com/steem/@blocktrades/-blocktrades-adds-support-for-directly-buyingselling-steem

#14 - @Busy.witness

Busy.witness is actually the witness account for the https://busy.org project. As a result, a vote for Busy.witness is really a vote for the Busy.org team.

Busy.org is probably the most well-known interface for viewing Steemit content, other than Steemit.com itself. It evokes an interface feel more like Medium.com. I have seen Busy.org posts reposted on Reddit, so it definitely has some reach!

The team behind Busy.org currently is:

CEO - @ekitcho
CTO - @fabien
Developer - @nil1511
Developer - @p0o
Developer - @yamadapc

Busy.witness’ Current Witness Update: https://steemit.com/steem/@busy.org/busy-news-three-months-beta-what-s-new-next
Busy.witness’ Original Witness Thread & Busy.org Announcement: https://steemit.com/busy/@busy.org/busy-your-next-gen-social-network-platform-based-on-steem-blockchain

#15 - @Bhuz

Bhuz was one of the first witnesses to help restore the Bitshares network during the two network-freezes experienced by it in 2015/2016.

Bhuz posts rarely, but when those posts happen they are nearly always either attempts to engender public debate on critical updates to Steemit, help reward valuable content creators on Steemit, or witness updates.

Bhuz’s multi-part “Find and Reward” series was an early focal point for curation on Steemit nearly 1 year ago. Bhuz has also argued passionately for debate around some very large changes Steem went through during HF17, including changes to the reward pool and the reward payout window.

Bhuz is the #2 (!!) witness on Bitshares, with a high reliability rating, and also a witness on the Peerplays and Muse blockchains. It is safe to say Bhuz is not lacking experience in running a reliable witness node!

Bhuz holds 224,000 SP and is NOT powering down, demonstrating substantial faith in Steemit long-term.

Bhuz’s Current Witness Update: https://steemit.com/muse-witness/@bhuz/witness-bhuz-on-muse-blockchain
Bhuz’s Original Witness Thread: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@bhuz/bhuz-witness-thread
Bhuz’s HF17 Post: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@bhuz/my-take-on-hardfork-17
Find & Reward #1: https://steemit.com/findandreward/@bhuz/let-s-find-and-reward-steem-s-contributors

#16 - @Furion

Furion has worked on so many projects as a developer that it’s almost too many to list here. The most well-known is probably View.ly, a decentralized video-uploading platform that does NOT track its users for ad revenue / monetary gain.

The story of why Furion created View.ly is fascinating. Formerly a self-described “moderately successful” YouTube personality in the gaming genre, (having amassed several million views in the “before-times” of YouTube,) Furion’s account and all of his videos were deleted overnight in the great “Content-ID Purge’ning” of 2007/2008. This naturally lead him to an interest in learning to implement decentralized video platforms.

Furion is also the developer behind SteemData at https://steemdata.com/stats which is a “database layer for Steem”, and the SteemData API, both of which are intended to allow third-parties from outside Steemit to interact with the Steem block-chain more easily.

Furion also created and maintains a Steem Python library, “a high quality and easy to use tool for developers.” Another project of Furion’s is “Conductor”, a simple out-of-the-box utility for setting up and managing a witness node.

As if that weren’t enough, Furion is also behind the “Steem Data Notify” blockchain monitoring service, and the “Mentions” App. Both of these utilities are highly fit for the modern age, providing notifications via email, telegram, or search any time you are mentioned in a post or comment. Truly, a godsend for the most narcissistic among us (whereas, I only use it for science, of course.)

Furion is also a co-founder of @SteemSports, and has defended its use on the platform in the past against factually inaccurate accusations of “30-50% reward pool use.”

Furion’s witness experienced a crash in May, 2017, and missed 90 blocks. Rather than be discouraged, this lead to an infrastructure and fail-over system upgrade. Now running a 4-server cluster split across two datacenters in Paris and Amsterdam, Furion posted about his experience getting dropped as a witness and having to work back up the list at https://steemit.com/witness-update/@furion/lessons-learned-from-failing-as-a-witness. After reading @furion's post about his experience, I was inspired to immediately buy hosting for a backup witness node myself and to plan to create a full video tutorial showing how I get it online!

Furion’s blog is covered in well-sourced looks at data on Steemit of all types. If there’s a graph you’re looking for, it can probably be found somewhere in there.

Furion has previously publicly rejected offers of at least 1 BTC to write articles on alt-coins having ICOs (promoted content) by stating he is “not for sale.”

Furion is also a Peerplays witness.

Furion holds 40,000 Steem and is currently powering down.

Furion’s Current Witness (Failure) Update: https://steemit.com/witness-update/@furion/lessons-learned-from-failing-as-a-witness
Furion Witness Thread:
SteemData: https://steemit.com/steemdata/@furion/steemdata-meets-sbds-sql-users-rejoice
Who is Furion?: https://steemit.com/introducemyself/@steemsports/who-is-furion
Steem Sports Back-end: https://steemit.com/steemsports/@furion/steemsports-server-infrastructure
View.ly Intro: https://steemit.com/viewly/@furion/introducing-viewly
View.ly Alpha (Viewer): https://steemit.com/viewly/@furion/introducing-viewly-alpha
SteemData: https://steemit.com/steemdata/@furion/introducing-steemdata-a-database-layer-for-steem
Steemdata API: https://steemit.com/steemdata/@furion/introducing-steemdata-webapi
Python Library: https://steemit.com/steem/@furion/announcing-new-steem-library-for-python-developers
Python Update: https://steemit.com/steem/@furion/updates-on-steem-python-steemdata-and-the-node-situation
Conductor: https://steemit.com/steem/@furion/introducing-conductor-a-simple-steem-witness-toolkit
Mentions App: https://steemit.com/steem/@furion/introducing-the-mentions-app-for-steem
SteemData Notify: https://steemit.com/steemdata/@furion/introducing-steemdata-notify

Phew, my citation muscle is tired out!

#17 - @Wackou

Wackou is a C++ and Python developer working in: “music analysis and real-time audio processing (and occasionally sysadmin),” - in other words, really cool sounding stuff.

A relatively early adopter of Bitcoin in 2013, Wackou quickly moved on to become an even earlier adopter of alt-coin cryptocurrencies in general. Wackou found ideological and technical alignment in the projects of @dan, first in Bitshares and later here at Steemit.

Wackou developed the “BTS Tools” project in Python, which he later expanded to run on all Graphene-based blockchains including Steem and Muse

Wackou has contributed large amounts of SP to beneficial community projects in the past, including 5000 SBD for Steemfest, as well as 9000 SP to @robinhoodwhale and 1000SP to @projectnewbie, both for curation.

Wackou is the 5th ranked Bitshares witness, and a Muse blockchain witness.

Wackou holds 520,000 SP and is NOT powering down, demonstrating substantial faith in Steemit long-term.

Wackou’s Current Witness Update: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@wackou/wackou-witness-update-2016-10-10
Wackou’s Original Witness Thread: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@wackou/wackou-witness-post
Wackou’s Github Page: https://github.com/wackou
BTS Tools Project: https://github.com/wackou/bts_tools

#18 - @Clayop

Clayop is an active poster with over 3000 followers, in both the Korean and English languages areas of Steemit. An ambassador for the Korean community, Clayop has actively attempted to promote ideas to help with solving abuse, including an interesting idea with merit involving self-moderating subcommunities he called “villages”.

Clayop has also posted about DPOS (delegated proof of stake, like Steemit) and whether or not it is feasible for the average user to intelligently manage 30 witness votes. In this post, he touched upon Dunbar’s number, the idea that a human can comfortably maintain only about 150 relationships.

Clayop also posts regular witness updates, and updates on the status of the Ethereum network and other important crypto-related information.

Clayop holds 33,000 SP and is currently powering down.

I am very grateful to @clayop for being one of the first top 20 witnesses along with @roadscape to vote for me as a witness!

Clayop’s Current Witness Update: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@clayop/witness-clayop-update-2017-09-02
Clayop’s Original Witness Thread (Per Witness Page): https://steemit.com/witness-category/@clayop/witness-clayop-update-2017-07-11
Village Anti-Abuse Proposal: https://steemit.com/steemit/@clayop/proposal-a-new-efficient-way-to-cope-with-abusers
DPOS & Witness Votes: https://steemit.com/dpos/@clayop/dpos-and-dunbar-number-can-people-manage-30-witness-votes
Ethereum Network Status: https://steemit.com/ethereum/@clayop/something-bad-happening-on-ethereum

#19 - @Liondani

Liondani may be one of the more generous witnesses we have on the Steemit platform.

A witness we have already reviewed, @Furion, became witness when Liondani voluntarily unvoted himself and voted for Furion instead, moving Furion to #19 (At the time) and Liondani to #21. This meant Liondani was foregoing substantial daily income from his witness payout, but saw no reduction in costs to operate his witness node.

@lexiconical was humbled to find that Liondani had resteemed his tax article on overpaying taxes on Steemit rewards at https://steemit.com/taxes/@lexiconical/valuing-steem-rewards-as-taxable-income-is-a-vast-overstatement-of-tax-liability-part-1. This article along with meeting @lexiconical in person also motivated me to change my tax payment system!

Liondani prefers mostly to curate and resteem, but when he posts he tends to post either about music, Greece, or Steemit itself.

Liondani is also a Bitshares stand-by witness, at #57.

Liondani holds 35,000 SP and is NOT powering down.

Liondani’s Most Recent Witness Update: https://steemit.com/steem/@liondani/transparency-witnesses-opinions-on-hard-fork-17-futures
Liondani’s “Gives Up” Witness Thread: https://steemit.com/steemit/@furion/the-nicest-thing-someone-had-done-for-me-on-steemit

#20 - @Ausbitbank

Ausbitbank is a co-Founder of the Minnow Support Project (and TeamAustralia), where he serves as a chat moderator. Early conversations he had with @Aggroed would lead to the creation of the Minnow Support Group approximately 3 months ago.

Ausbitbank operates a number of projects within the MSP sphere, including Discordia, a bid-bot, and Centerlink, a dole-themed bot which votes on TeamAustralia related posts.

Ausbitbank is a big-time curator, and you will often find him voting and resteeming on posts all over the Steemit landscape. My feed is regularly filled with gems he had dug up all across the platform.

Ausbitbank also runs the AusBitBot, a bot dedicated to supporting “quality controversial content creators.”

Ausbitbank holds 31,000 SP and is NOT powering down.

Ausbitbank’s Current Witness Update: https://steemit.com/witness-update/@ausbitbank/witness-and-seed-nodes-updated-to-steemd-0-19-2
Ausbitbank’s Original Witness Thread:
Discordia: http://minnowsupportproject.org/discordia/
Centerlink: http://minnowsupportproject.org/centerlink/
Ausbitbot: https://steemit.com/@ausbitbot
Minnow Support Group: http://minnowsupportproject.org/

Thank You Top 20 Witnesses for Your Service!

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Would you join us in taking a moment to thank each of these witnesses for their service because without them, we would not have a community here worth belonging to? The best way we can thank a witness is with a witness vote because that one vote lasts indefinitely! With what we shared about the top 20 witnesses here, would you please join us in making witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because our witness votes are the most important choices we make on Steem?

If voting for 30 witnesses sounds like too much effort, setting a proxy at the bottom of the voting page allows another user we trust to cast all our votes for us. The proxy can be changed or removed at any time and should be a user we trust to make our most important votes for us AND keep them up to date as new witnesses come online and existing witnesses go offline. I check my witness votes almost every day and am grateful for the 100 or so users trusting me as a proxy to make witness votes today!

Thank you very much for reading this post! @lexiconical and I hope you enjoyed it! We plan to continue going through all of the active witnesses in future posts!

Love,
Jerry Banfield

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