Hi @crypto.piotr

Thanks for the witness vote and interesting topic.

Being a witness in the top20 will give you a high reward, currently about USD294.00 per week (see my witness earnings report), as the price of Steem goes up that reward goes higher too.

For witnesses below the top20, the reward drops dramatically but you can still manage to get some profit if you do your homework and find an affordable server.

I currently earn USD17.76 per week and my server costs me USD37.50 per month. The extra helps me pay for servers for other Steem related projects (Hivemind node, Discord bot server, IPFS pinning server...).

The witness (producer) reward are paid in STEEM Power, so it's a kind of investment. I use fiat to pay for the witness server that then generates SP instead of using fiat to buy STEEM and powering up.

It's also the pride of contributing for something you believe in.

There isn't much responsibility that witnesses seem to hold

The main priority of a witness is to sign blocks, host the blockchain and ensure a secure and reliable network. Without Steem witnesses there is no Steem blockchain and we won't be having this conversation on my blog post. A top20 witness needs to pay for a reliable and fast server that can handle a lot of transactions or else it will affect all Steemians. This is the reason why Steemians (including witnesses) need to choose their vote properly and remove votes from witnesses that are not performing. The zombie witnesses above, for example, are missing blocks everytime it is their turn. By removing votes from them, they will drop ranking and will get less blocks to sign hence less chance to disturb the network.