Meet Steem's Top 10 Witnesses!

Which Steem witnesses should we vote for?  How do we get to know  existing witnesses better?  What are the top 50 witnesses contributing  in addition to maintaining the witness servers?  Where is a more in  depth list where we can easily get to know the witnesses in addition to https://steemd.com/witnesses and https://steemdb.com/witnesses?  I hope this post and the matching video starts to answer these questions!  Witnesses create the Steem blockchain every 3 seconds. Our witness votes decide who gets to produce each block at https://steemit.com/~witnesses.  Every 63 seconds, we are trusting the top 20 witnesses to produce a  block for us and giving 0.18 Steem Power in exchange for the effort. The  top 50 witnesses from 21 to 50 produce blocks ranging from every hour  to every few minutes in exchange for 0.8 Steem Power while witnesses  below the top 50 get a block every hour at most down to 1 block a day at  around rank 90.  Thank you very much to @lexiconical for doing the research to make this  post possible!  Almost all of the text in the "Meet Steem's Top 10  Witnesses!" section of this post is directly from @lexiconical's  research and is his writing.     Meet Steem's Top 10 Witnesses!  1 - @gtg   Gtg, or “Gandalf The Grey”, has risen from the ranks of humble stand-by  witnesses, to become the current top witness. His expertise in IT  security makes him a reliable seed for the #1 witness spot.  He has been involved both in improving the Steemit website’s securities  via programming, and helping to educate others on network and witness  security via his blog. He composed one of the earliest Steemit guides on  witness node security and protection from DDOS attacks.  2 - @jesta Jesta is a talented developer on the Graphene blockchain  (Steem/Steemit).  Jesta is the developer behind some of Steemit’s favorite tools,  including the popular ChainBB (the interface for viewing Steem more like  a forum) and the ubiquitous tool Steemdb. He has also contributed a  number of experimental scripts and other projects, such as a Steempython  based “fake-smart contract” script that allows for ICO-like events on  the Steemit blockchain.  3 - @timcliff Timcliff is an active developer on the Steemit platform, doing a lot of  behind-the-scenes work to help keep Steemit’s code accurate and updated.  He has helped update the vote-slider code to account for delegated SP,  updated the Blocktrades “Buy” link to fill in the currently logged in  Steemit’s user’s account, and has also created code to reduce the  vote-slider threshold to 125 SP (though the community has not yet  implemented it.)  4 - @Good-karma Good-karma is the highly talented developer behind some of Steemit’s  most critical supplementary tools. The most important of these is  probably Esteem, the mobile (Android/iPhone) and desktop app through  which many regular users interact with Steemit daily. Without his  unceasing efforts, Steemit would not have a robust mobile app offering  which, in this day and age, would be practically suicidal for an  aspiring social media platform.  5 - @RoelandP RoelandP’s best-known contribution to the Steemit platform is probably  the original Steemfest, which took place in Amsterdam in 2016. After 3  months of organization, the original Steemfest managed to draw 206  attendees from 31 nationalities across the world.  6 - @Pfunk Pfunk is one of the oldest users on Steemit, and as he notes in his  original witness post, he acquired much of his stake via mining.  7 - @Pharesim Pharesim is a developer, mostly in web-related languages such as “PHP  and JS, but also Python, Java and Go.” He has also developed piston  scripts for witness usages and voting bot scripts on Steemit.  8 - @Riverhead Riverhead is probably best known as being a key developer and server  manager for the Steemit.chat service, a key piece of secondary  infrastructure for many Steemit communities. In particular, certain  community-serving channels such as the “Abuse” channel operate only  thanks to the hard work behind the scenes at Steemit.chat.  9 - @Someguy123 Someguy123 is a well-known developer (top 3% at Bitrated) of third-party  applications for both Litecoin and Steem. His skills include python,  javascript and PHP, as well as system administration.  He has been personally vouched for by Charlie Lee, also known as the  creator of Litecoin. He’s developed a number of projects, including Lite  Vault, Explorer, Steem Center, and the AnonSteem service which allows  another vector for registering new users onto the Steemit platform.  10 - @Roadscape Roadscape is (as of 11/16) a front-end developer working for Steemit,  Inc. Most of his day-to-day work revolves around adding new  user-interface features and fixing bugs of all types.  Roadscape’s best known tool is Steemd, the first user-interface for  exploring the Steem blockchain. You all probably know it better as “that  place I refresh every day to see my voting power.”