Auditing my Witness Votes: November 17 2018

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Witnesses are the block producers on the Steem blockchain and they write the blocks and keep the blockchain itself online. The top witnesses also agree which version of steem to run on the blockchain.

Steem operates on Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) in which all users vote to choose these witnesses, much like an election. The distinction here is that this election happens moment to moment and your votes never expire.

Each account can vote for up to 30 witnesses and it is our duty as well as our right as steemians to vote for witnesses if we want to ensure the stability and performance of the STEEM Blockchain.
(thanks to @toofasteddie for setting this out so nicely in this post.)

This is one of those tasks which I find a bit daunting. How do you decide, even from the 100 active witnesses that are producing blocks (some 600 witnesses are listed), who to choose?

@toofasteddie sets out some basic criteria from @deadwitnesses:

• How many days have passed since this witness last wrote a block to the blockchain?
• Has the witness written a post in the last week?
• Has the witness voted in the last week?
• Is the signing key of the witness active? (if not, this means the witness cannot produce any blocks)

and then points us to a useful tool by @deadwitnesses where we can check what our witnesses are doing:
http://duplibot.com/deadwitnesses/

I found I had 1 inactive witness and 1 witness who never posts or votes. These were removed: bye-bye.

One witness had also not posted or voted for over a week, but I knew this witness was travelling to Europe from the States with his family, taking in steemfest on the way, so I guessed he might be busy :)

Steemfest was great for meeting witnesses and checking them out; plus here in the UK we are trying to build our participation in steem. It wasn't hard to pick two new witnesses to replace the two I had just lost:

• @felixxx - lovely, friendly person who came and spoke to everyone.
• @c0ff33a - a UK witness and we had a nice steemit chat yesterday evening. I believe @c0ff33a also has some involvement with @dstors ... perhaps he will tell us more in the comments.

(I checked the deadwitness app again after adding these two - wouldn't do to add witnesses that weren't meeting my criteria)!

I'd also met some other witnesses at steemfest that I wanted to add, plus support @helpie. I went through my witness list looking to see what I knew about everyone. If I couldn't recall a single thing, then I replaced that witness with someone I had met: @blocktrades, @gtg and @reggaemuffin joined the list.

It's not perfect yet. The tool that @toofasteddie introduced me to means I can do a quick check every month when I review my witnesses. I will know then that my votes are supporting active witnesses who engage with the community. And each month, I can do a more detailed research and review on, say, three of the witnesses.

You can see who I vote for by looking at https://steemworld.org/@shanibeer, finding account details in the lefthand column and then choosing the witness votes tab.

You can get regular witness updates by following @witnessupdate.
You can also choose a proxy who will vote for you.

You know, using all your witness votes will also improve your ratings in the Curation and Engagement Leagues.

So which witnesses do you vote for and why?

Do you have any recommendations?

Postscript: attended (can't honestly say I participated) @shadowspub's Witness Ramble. Similar content to what we see in posts about DApp development, although interesting to get more context and background. Best conversation was around downvoting vs flagging, and the purpose of downvoting.

Further postscript: downloaded the most recent version of @actifit and still, four days later, it is only picking up one in every five steps (on one occasion, it jumped twelve steps). Although I get a great response from simply waggling my wrist, can you help me @mcfarhat?

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