"STEEM WITNESS."

Leave any questions you have about steem witnesses, and you WILL receive an answer in the near future. You can also join the poll: How much do you know about "witness"?

If you have clicked on this post then you are either curious about witnesses or you are a witness or you are bored out of your mind.
Either way, I wholeheartedly welcome you all to the latest edition of "...for dummies, ....simply explained" series.

If you are a dumdum like me, you will need a dumdum explanation to many things that may be very easy for a lot of people to understand. As a fellow dumdum, I have taken some time from my not so very busy schedule to learn about witnesses. I am going to reproduce what I have learnt in the most simple way I can...that will be easy coz I learned it in the most simple way I could. We have come across the term "witness" very often, yet it doesn't make much sense to many. There is a lot of confusion as to what a witness is and what do they do etc etc. Disclaimer: I am not going to be very "techy".

Here goes:

Steem is run on servers, and a witness is a person who runs a steem server. These servers create blocks, from the word "block"chain. These blocks carry information and keep 'em safe.
They also do the STEEM/USD price thing, we won't get into that.

Steemit FAQ define's a witness as:

the network's block producers and governance body.

I prefer to look at them as guardian angels more than governance body...governance body sounds very harsh.

A witness must be able to run a safe, secure and durable "node", or a "witness node" to create or process blocks efficiently so as keep up everything timely and not to miss blocks. This is an expensive task, since it requires a lot of high tech equipment and electricity bills pile up.
The witnesses get compensated for their efforts in the form of Steem Power, proportionate to the blocks processed. The higher the number of blocks processed, the higher payout of SP. Sometimes, especially when starting out as a witness, the steem power earned from processing blocks and running a server is not enough to cover the expenses.
The number of blocks processed depends on their ranking as a witness.

Witnesses always give back to the community from the SP they earn or just because they care about the welfare of the platform.
Every witness has a different way of interacting with the community.

The most important thing to know about witnesses and ranking:

The top 20 witnesses must approve "hard forks" or decline them when the time arrives. Hard forks are radical changes and effects how the blockchain works.

This is why it is very important to know the witnesses, understand each witness, how and what do they do to contribute, how much do you agree with them and so on...AND VOTE FOR WITNESSES accordingly.

Remember, without witnesses the blockchain will not exist...nor will your rewards. The transactions witnesses carry out also carry your rewards. If you do not vote for the right witnesses, some evil masterminds can take over the top 20 witness spots and bring doom to this magical platform.

It is very important for us to choose our witnesses who have the right intentions for the platform and refuse any sort of hard fork that could be against our well-being.

This is not hard at all. Getting to know witnesses is easy. You can know them by their posts, actions or directly interacting with them. Witnesses are friendly and very often are more than happy to interact. I have personally interacted with @c0ff33a @enginewitty @jackmiller and they have been nothing less than friendly, nice and just plain awesome!
I love them!

Also, I found a quick overview of the witnesses @blockbrothers vote for and they have detailed their reasoning. Thanks to @brittandjosie for sharing the link with me.
This post may help you find some insight about few witnesses:
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@blockbrothers/blockbrothers-complete-witness-vote-list-januari-2019-two-upcoming-changes

Voting

Talking about @blockbrothers, you can also choose a proxy voter. In case you don't know who to vote for or do not want to vote for yourself, you can select a proxy user who votes for you. For example, if you trust and select @blockbrothers they will vote in your stead.

In any case, voting is easy.
You can vote for up to 30 witnesses. If you want to change your vote after you have already voted for 30 witnesses, you have to unvote someone first. The votes are free and cost you nothing. Quite the deal for maintaining the well-being of the blockchain I say!

You can check out a list of top 100 witnesses here: https://steemd.com/witnesses
A more statistical list, including all witnesses and a lot of details to look at: https://steemian.info/witnesses

In any case, voting is easy.
Vote here, just takes 1 click: https://steemit.com/~witnesses

For a dumdum like me, knowing this much is more than enough to realize the importance of witnesses and the importance of voting for witnesses. I feel like I have covered ample ground about what witnesses are and how are we, stakeholders involved. It's 3 a.m. here, and I'm going to sleep.

Leave your questions, remarks, criticism...any sort of comment if you feel like it.

That's one more blind spot from Blind's pot.

Thanks to @bdcommunity for their unrivalled support. Show them love!
Thanks to @welcomewagon & #steemterminal for taking the time to help newbies. Stop by and say hello!
@cranium is one of my most favs!