Distribution of Witness Votes
For most Steemians Witnesses, the gatekeepers of the Steem Blockchain, are a mysterious bunch of people.
So who is actually voting for them and hence wielding significant influence over the Steem Blockchain?
In the last few weeks I have been on a drive to answer these questions as well as get the know the Witnesses a bit better so that I can cast my votes. Each Steem account has 30 votes which they can cast for Witnesses and it's important to use your vote. Every vote counts!
Well some a bit more than others ....
Image pixabay.com
Today I am going to look at the distribution of the votes for Witnesses in some detail. This analysis may be of interest to witnesses who wish to campaign for votes but even if your not a witness I think you will find it interesting to learn about the influencers of the main governance layer of the Steem Blockchain.
Rank of Witnesses
When a steem account casts a vote for a witness their vote is weighted based on the Vests of their account. You can count up all the weighted votes that each witness has received and rank them.
What are vests? I think of vests as another number that represents how much Steem Power you have in your account.
The following graph shows the rank of the witnesses who have votes. As new blocks are added to the Steem Blockchain the top 20 witnesses get to create one of those blocks in each round of block production. A backup witness (outside the top 20) also gets to create a block in each round (chosen at random but with a frequency based on where they rank).
10% of all newly minted Steem is distributed to Witnesses as payment for producing blocks
- The top 20 Witnesses are shaded in blue with the amount of weighted votes (or Vests) on the y axis.
- The x axis shows the witness rank.
- There is very steep cliff as you go out past rank 40.
Remember the rank is based on weighted votes ...
Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS)
The title for the method of mining/block production for Steem indicates that blocks are produced based in some way on stake of account holders. The idea here is that an account gets influence on the mining, hence the governance of the system, based on how much stake or Steem Power they have.
What if it mining wasn't based on stake? Let's look and see what the number of votes for each of these witnesses looks like
- I have highlighted the outliers, accounts that are getting significant numbers of votes but are not in the top 50. Inspecting the names we can see some of these outliers are accounts that are still getting votes but are no longer witnesses.
https://steemian.info/witnesses has an up to date list of witnesses.
So what proportion of accounts are actually voting?
Voting Percentages
| Type | Count | Vests |
|---|---|---|
| Direct Votes | 3.9% | 23% |
| Proxy Votes | .7% | 13% |
| Total Votes | 4.6% | 36% |
- That is 4.6% of accounts by number vote.
- 36% of accounts by stake vote (which is probably more representative) and this figure increases to 48% if you exclude the Steemit Account, even higher if you exclude Steemit employees.
- Nearly 6k accounts vote by proxy which makes up .7% of the votes by number or 13% by amount. These proxy votes are important and make up more than half of the direct votes by amount.
If you exclude @freedom who delegates to @pumpkin the 13% reduces to 9.2%.
Based on these numbers Stake Weighted accounts drive the Witness Votes.
As a reference point, voter turnout of 40% - 60% in US elections is average. Source www.fairvote.org
In the next graph we look in a little more detail at the most influential of these voting accounts.
Voter Influence
We show here how much each of the Wtitness Votes (by stake) are made up with votes from the top 8 voters.
- @freedom on its own would pull most of the top 100 witnesses into the top 50.
This next graphs looks at the spread of these top 8 voters across accounts of different rank.
- I find it surprising that some of these big Steem Power holders are not exerting more influence. @minority-report for example only votes for 3 witnesses.
How many accounts use their full 30 votes?
- About 12.4K people vote for 1 account and 5k use their full 30 votes.
Voting Account Holders with the Largest Stake
I would expect the people with most stake to be the most conscientious in casting their votes. This last few graphs looks at the number of votes cast by top stake holders.
- Is it healthy that so many large stakeholders do not vote?
Many of the large accounts are Steemit Inc. accounts or employees but there does seem to be a huge imbalance here between stakeholders and influence over the future of the Blockchain. This does not strike me as a healthy balance.
So ignoring the Steemit accounts and employees of the people that do vote how many votes do they cast?
- A significant number here again do not cast the full 30 votes.
Discussion
After going through the process of choosing my witnesses I found it difficult to spend the full 30 votes. Is 30 too many.
Would a smaller number of votes add an opportunity cost to choosing witnesses and make the process more competitive?
Witness voting, influences the group of people that are delegated the responsibility to achieve consensus on transactions, hardforks, price feeds etc ... Why do some of the accounts with large stake not use all their votes or a significant proportion of them at least. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Additional Resources
@SteemReports
If I have whetted your appetite for more analysis on this I would suggest you check out http://steemreports.com/ where you will find interactive charts that you can explore in more detail.
Getting to Know the Witnesses Series
Get to know the witnesses a bit better, if your new to Steemit or just want to learn a bit more you may find this series interesting.
- https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-1
- https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-2
- https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-3
- https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-4
- https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-5
- https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-6
Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Travel.
Very interesting data.
The 'big bit' that might grate hard is that in reality the top 20 witnesses are controlled / chosen by a mere handful of mega-voters.
Is that good for the platform...
How does that 'influence' the top witnesses' views on current controversies such as the reward distribution issue that @fulltimegeek is currently tooling up to do battle on?
No comment is all they might say...
Really fascinating article. I must confess that I've not used all 30 of my votes yet. I'm still getting to know the witnesses, and take the voting responsibility seriously enough to not just pick anyone.
It's very interesting to see that the big dogs basically select the top 30 because vests are the determinant of vote power for witnesses. I still take it seriously to use my votes, even if I make a minuscule difference in who actually gets selected.
I wonder if some of the big ones don't use any of their votes because they feel they would have undo influence. You can use a vote slider when upvoting, but witness votes are all or nothing.
thank you @eroche your post is very useful for me ,,,
I didn't understand the whole article, but I will try to read over again to get the main point. Because this is important to be well understand by minnows like me.
if you have any questions drop over to Blogger Central on discord and Ill try to answer them. https://discord.gg/UdaJFx
Thank you sir
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I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 41 SBD worth and should receive 98 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
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TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigI need to start using my votes i've only been here for about a week
Nice post @eroche very intersting. Thanks for sharing