Knowing Steem Blockchain #3: Witnesses

Hello, it's me.

This time we will continue learning about Steem Blockchain and now I'm going to introduce you to witnesses and their role in the ecosystem. This is a foundamental part of the blockchain so I hope you enjoy adding new knowledge to your brain and start supporting your favorite witnesses if you don't.

What a witness is?

Every 3 seconds the blockchain create a new block where new transactions are included and they are added to the blockchain as irreversible information, if you are familiar with blockchain technology you could know that the new transactions needs to be validated by miners, well, that is the role for witnesses.

Steem works under DPoS (delegated proof of stake) protocol where witnesses or well known as miners needs to keep some stake in their wallets or get delegated staked from the community using account_witness_vote or account_witness_proxy as operations. As much delegated or own stake a witness have much higher in the top list he will be listed and more priority he will have when selecting a witness to validate a new block and receive SP as reward for this work.

The first 20 witnesses will have the major priority to validate and it will be decreasing with the rank list so as much higher a witness have much money he will generate. The blockchain also works under a consensous mechanism to determine the blockchain hardfork version or other things such the account creation fee, if something of this wants to be changed it should be approved by at least 17 witnesses inside TOP 20 and 1 inside TOP 30 so they have the ability to preserve the security and stability of the network, so it is important to always vote by trusted persons by the community or persons who are actively contributing with the community.

In order to attract support witnesses tend to provide something that help the community, this could be promotion, curation, or software development. So, you should check what a witness is doing before voting him, you could find interesting projects.

Who can be a witness?

This is the million question, and the short aswer is "yes", but you will need first a specific computer connected to internet to be able to deploy your witness node. The minimum specifications that you will need to run a witness is something like 6 vCPU Cores - 16 GB RAM - 600GB SSD but as much as you add much better will work your node, so use it only as a reference. You can buy a computer to this but the more common is rent a server, so be a witness is a investment too! ^{here is a tutorial by @ety001}

Who should I support?

Well, it is completely your choice, I add here the current TOP 40 list so you can check them and add your votes (you have 30 votes, try to use it! It is free, and you can remove any time you want)

Rank	Witness
1	justyy
2	symbionts
3	dev.supporters
4	steemchiller
5	steem.history
6	dlike
7	future.witness
8	maiyude
9	rnt1
10	protoss20
11	upvu.witness
12	roadofrich
13	steem-agora
14	etainclub
15	bangla.witness
16	xpilar.witness
17	italygame
18	marcosdk
19	boylikegirl.wit
20	steemit-market
21	cotina
22	alexmove.witness
23	inwi
24	pennsif.witness
25	smt-wherein
26	successgr.with
27	ety001
28	rlawlstn123
29	hinomaru-jp
30	jswit
31	matreshka
32	newsteem.witness
33	hoasen
34	juddsmith079
35	leverfile
36	seven.wit
37	enjoylondon
38	scissor.sisters
39	upeross
40	steem-dragon