Ask us anything #1 - What is the roll of a witness?
Since we became a witness, we received a lot of questions about the Steem Blockchain.
These questions are coming from veteran Steemians to newcomers.
Starting today, we will occasionally pick a question to answer and clarify it.
Today we answer the following.
What is a STEEM Witness and what purpose does it serve?
First, it's important to understand that Steemit.com and the Steem blockchain are not the same things.
The Steem blockchain stores all the data. (upvotes, blog posts, replies etc...)
The website Steemit.com visualize the data of the Steem Blockchain into a nice website and also makes it easy to interact with the Steem Blockchain. There are many other fronts ends besides Steemit.com that do the same thing.
Every 3 seconds a block of data is created and linked to the blockchain. In that block are all the actions that occurred on the blockchain in those 3 seconds.
(This is the reason that when you send Steem from one user to another it takes 3 seconds.)
What a witness does is verify the block (verify the transactions) before it's linked to the chain.
The fact that it only takes 3 seconds shows how efficient the Steem blockchain is. Bitcoin, for instance, has a block time of 10 minutes.
To verify the block a witness has to set up a witness node (server) for the sole purpose of verifying the block. Many witnesses also run a backup server in case the main server fails.
For every block, a witness verifies STEEM is earned.
Many witnesses do a lot more besides running a server. They actively engage with the community and in some cases develop for the Blockchain. @blockbrothers, for instance, developed an App called Steemify. We did this for free.
The witnesses also have to reach consensus on every change (hard fork) that is made to the blockchain.
The current list of all the witnesses can be found here: https://steemian.info/witnesses.
(note: the higher up the list you are the more blocks you get assigned and the more STEEM is earned).
The community get's to vote for their witnesses by voting for them just like voting on blog posts. And like with voting on blog posts this is stake based.
The more Steempower you have the more say you have over which witness gets higher up the list.
Voting on a witness
Each Steemian has 30 votes to share on a witness of choice. It's very important you select the witnesses you want to support and actively update that list from time to time. Sometimes witnesses stop being a witness for instance.
If you think we deserve your vote, please vote for us by following the instruction on the bottom of this post.
If you support us please vote here for @blockbrothers
Be sure to check that it says blockbrothers below the manual voting field.
Only press 'VOTE’, the green round button will cancel your vote.
You can also choose to set us as your proxy.
Makers of Steemify. The dedicated notification app for anything happening on the Steem blockchain
Get in touch:
https://blockbrothers.io
[email protected] | [email protected]
Telegram: https://t.me/blockbrothers
what happens when a witness you vote stop being a witness? what are the things to look at for when voting a witness, I would love to understand this witness better, always seeing it but don't understand it.
Good questions! Let’s address this in a later Q&A post.
As far as voting for witnesses that stop being a witness, your vote will remain on that witness and is basically lost. That’s why I think it’s important to review your votes every once in a while.
Okay thanks, I will keep an eye on the Q&A session as I have a lot of questions as regarding this witness issue.
Great info but if you mind 1 question for those who haven't seen the mythical "block" I know with cryptocurrencies they are hashes but how does it work with the social media site? Like is the block a bunch of posts or something? Please don't laugh too hard. Cheers!
First and foremost thing steem witness should do is do nothing if sbd price rises :lol: