Understanding The Importance and The Real Roles Of Witnesses.
A lot of interest has arisen lately about Witnesses.
Well, I expect a lot of that to drop once we start seeing the market push Crypto prices back up and people start popping the bubbly when seeing all the money that they are making.
However, this doesn't change the need to better understand things!
So rather than go into all the definitions etc, I shall supply a link to a perfect dead straight forwards definition of what a Witness is:
https://www.steem.center/index.php?title=Steem_Witness
This link has been put together by @someguy123.
So when you finish with this post, go ahead and take a read of this link.
What I shall attempt to do here is to present it graphically using something that is pretty much well known to most of the democratic world.
Parliament, Senate or what ever else you wish to call it.
For those who are not familiar with how parliaments are set up, here are some pictures to help out:
So here you see the parliament with all its seats etc.
For the purpose of this here post I shall use the first graphic and try to relate it to us Steemians and our democracy.
So, lets start making this make sense.
See that table in the middle, lets make that the company, Steemit. Inc.
Now come all us Steemians.
and then there are the TOP 20 witnesses who do all the wheeling and dealing with Steemit Inc. in the name of us Steemians.
The TOP20 do not produce all the blocks in our blockchain, they produce most of them.
The next 40 witnesses produce a big chunk of the blocks too, so lets add them too.
and then come the rest of the witnesses who make chicken feed, but more importantly a speakers stand where all representatives of their voters can have their say and make suggestions and so on.
After all we pride ourselves with freedom of speech, we pride ourselves on equality of all individuals, from the minorities to those who represent the majority.
So this is how the above parliament schematic would look for us here on The Steem Blockchain.
So there we go, we can compare this to any democracy out there.
Oops, except for the fact that we do not have a speakers stand:
THIS IS REALITY:
So we are far from being a democratic society but we are heading there!
Baby steps, but we are getting there.
Hopefully this example of a parallel case of democracy in action, that comes from real life helps better explain what some of the witnesses here are trying to achieve.
Sure, the "governmental" system in place suits those who run the show and rake in all the money, but things have to change if we want to see a future for everyone here!
I seriously do not know of one single regime that has ever been able to beat democracy and freedom of speech!
Well, some have, but they have also destroyed everything they touched!
Thanks for reading.
"things have to change if we want to see a future for everyone here!"
well said and it is the back benchers that are growing communities and eventually make change
Let's hope it's more functional than most house' of representatives. ;) Thank you very good post.
Very interesting to see the steem version of 'democracy' like this.
But of course it does miss one key element of steemocracy - SP weighted voting ... and the consequent reality that the Top 20 are in effect controlled by one very very large anonymous voter - Freedom/Pumpkin.
In fact 16 of the top 20 heavily rely on the Freedom/Pumpkin vote, along with the majority of the potential replacements in the 21-30 slots.
So the health of the democracy does have to be questioned - particularly as noone knows who Freedom/Pumpkin is.
I have always feared that should Steem ever 'make it big' this single fact will make the platform incredibly vulnerable to the prying eyes of the world's investigative journalists. The phrase 'feeding frenzy' does come to mind...
You are thinking "long term" and you want to see this place be everything it can be for everyone.
That is what I read out of your reply.
This place was put together on the basis of Proof of Brain, yet the inability to comprehend it keeps bringing in that degenerate Proof of Stake (POS) into it.
If anything is to change, it shall take a lot of lobbying from many Steemians and as with any evolution of morals and humanity it shall need a revolution of the mind! (R)Evolution!
We probably need revolutions and evolutions in equal measure.
In fact on some things we may need to turn full circle...
A bit late replying to this lol.
However. One key point is that the vote level for a witness getting to the top 20 should not have any bearing on the voice of the platform, That is were everything falls down.
While the top witness will gain a higher reward. This should not also increase the value of the voice spoken. A higher SP vote to a witness can get them to a top position, But like in all elections after that vote is cast, All witness should have an equal vote on changes. Without this Slavery ensues or a class tier system were only the wealth is listened to.
I have been very close to making a publication about the witnesses in Spanish, since much in my country we are not clear about the importance of witnesses, I have tried to guide my friends to an extensive vote and in the choice of living witnesses who work for the development of the community, the idea of making a comparative explanation makes the work very particular and easier to understand, thank you very much for your contribution.
In my country, unfortunately, it happens and everything is destroyed.
Nice one Jack, and it's a little loaded at the top for sure but I don't think that's sustainable in the long-term.
Even in the 6 weeks, I've been focussed on witnesses movements I've seen a number of community-based witnesses make significant inroads towards the top 20.
It won't be long before you'll need to prove you're worthy of a continuing witness vote rather than just earning it by default.
IMHO the proxy vote is the biggest scam ever and allows people to game the system even more.
Can you imagine if people used proxy votes in everyday politics?
The proxy system suits corporations, not decentralized systems. People shouldn't have more power than their own vote.
Yes, I addressed that "proxy" topic along with a few others in a previous post.
It is rather confusing for many Steemians and my thought trail behind this post was to try and relate it to something that people are more familiar with.
One of the biggest issues I see here is that the Proof of Brain concept was but aside to the Proof of Stake (POS) concept and all the usual flaws that the POS concept brings with it, powered by "greed" make things a lot harder for everyone.
So, presenting the issues in ways that people can understand is obviously one of the most important tasks we have.
Dead voters, dead witness servers, proxy voting, no freedom of speech in the governance setup (as shown above), POS taking precedence over Proof of Brain and the list goes on.
All of these topics need to be addressed and made public, no beating around the bush so to say, need to address each of them directly and openly if we want things to start moving forwards as per the initial vision described in our Whitepaper.
This is well explained. Hope this would encourage more minnows to vote for their witness.
Thanks @jackmiller I think the principle behind the system design is very clever but there are some implementation issues. Ever since day 1 I was confused about why we had such importance for just the Top 20 Witnesses and yet we could each vote for 30. If we just reversed those numbers (eg, Top 30 with voting for just 20) it would dilute the ability for 1 large account(s) to monopolise the Top Tier Witness ranks and give us a more "representative" democratic platform.
But it comes to self-interest. Those who have the power are unlikely to willingly give it up. As history has shown time and again.
30 votes for "TOP 50" who all get the same rewards for block production!
We'll get into the accounting soon enough!
They obviously "need" the money!
Your post is very good ,, many people in this world become a blind witness, the wrong even he who won, while the right one has become wrong. Resulted by unfair witness in witnessing ....
@witnesswatch
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