Steem Witnesses - The Political System Of The Steem Blockchain 👥
Okay so this is one of the most challenging subjects new users have been struggling with grasping. I want to dive in momentarily, but first I'll drop a few explainatory videos and other guides I've used to learn to credit their hard work and give you other sources and different media formats to share on.
Guides
- https://steemit.com/witness-category/@timcliff/witness-voting-guide by @timcliff
- https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitguide/steemitguide-what-is-a-exactly-is-a-steem-witness-and-why-every-user-should-vote by @steemitguide
- https://steemit.com/witness-category/@someguy123/seriously-what-is-a-witness-why-should-i-care-how-do-i-become-one-answer by @someguy123
- https://steemit.com/steemit-guides/@pfunk/a-full-steemit-user-s-guide-to-steem-witnesses by @pfunk
- Lastly check out this questionaire that @cryptofiend wrote up for Steemit witnesses to fill out as a way for them to work with the community on their transparency - https://steemit.com/steemit/@thecryptofiend/witness-questionnaire-a-solution-for-voter-confusion by @thecryptofiend
- If you are looking to become a witness, here is a guide: https://steemit.com/steemhelp/@steemed/become-a-steem-witness-essentials by @steemed
Video Explainations
Simple Overview
Steem witnesses are essentially a vote-based political system that enables certain users to have a major influence on how Steemit will progress in terms of updates on the blockchain (hardforks) the value of Steemit to SBD (price feed), the value given to a new registered user to afford them to get started, they are the main producer of blocks for the blockchain, and have a major impact on community projects and Steemit social platforms. It is a delegated proof of stake (DPOS) system which is explained in the video above.
Some things to be clear:
- technically anyone can be a witness, but you generally need to meet some requirements for people to actual support you (which you'll need)
- witnesses are for the Steem blockchain, not Steemit, but through Steemit we can vote and do everything we need to do related to the process
- you can delegate your vote to a proxy
- you should care because if you are not voting nor having someone proxy vote for you, other people could be voting in malicious representation for Steem
- you have 30 votes which you can change at any given time
Steemd Witnesses
You can view a list of the current top 100 witnesses here: https://steemd.com/witnesses. Some are not actually active but still have their votes thus remain in the top 100. The main people with power are the top 19 and 2 others from the pool of 100. One is a backup witness and one is a miner only witness.
I will not be diving into extremely technical explanations as always, my audience is generally minnows or people trying to learn the basics and get an understanding!
Vote For Witnesses at https://steemit.com/~witnesses
You get 30 votes and you can see how many you have left. You can also see the witness thread for each witness which is like their whitepaper for what their goals are / what they are supporting and or working on.
At the bottom you can see who you have voted for and if you want to change your vote. You can also set a proxy so someone else can vote on your behalf! I intend to one day become a witness, but for now if you don't want to get super involved in all the politics and keeping up with different witnesses then you can always set me as your proxy! I will start adding that to my signature in case people want to do that.
In the future I will share updates on witnesses and who I feel should receive votes etc.
Steem Witnesses Further Explained
Quick picture-less concise explanations below cover the major topics of witnesses. I am resharing the table from https://steemd.com/witnesses so you can refer to it with these explanations
Voting
Everyone gets 30 votes per account to give out and or take back at any time via https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Proxy
Proxying your vote is pretty simple you just go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses navigate to the bottom and type in a username here:
I have started to take an active interest in Steem witnesses treating them as future global decentralized politics. If you don't want to learn or bother to stay up to date with it, but do not want your vote wasted then you can make me your proxy to vote on your behalf!
Registration
In the table you can see the different registration fees given by each witness
STEEM Price Feed
In the table you can see the feed. They update their value for STEEM every day to influence the price and the rate of how it converts STEEM to SBD. This information is displayed with the other major indicators here: https://steemd.com/witnesses
Hardfork Influence
They control what version of STEEM we are on and add policies when they commit to a hardfork in the blockchain. This is crucial as they basically set future "legislation or policies" to be enforced on the STEEM blockchain.
SBD Interest Rate
They have influence over the rate at which you earn SBD in your savings and power.
There is a lot that they do outside of their assigned duties, but it's important to vote and participate in order to do our part to ensure the platform stays quality as part of our responsibility in the free decentralized network that is STEEM.
Leave a comment for what you think about all this and if you're going to vote, if you have already, or if you'll make your proxy. Also given that I'm out here trying to help minnows on a daily let me know if you would consider voting for me as a witness (to start gauging support) I currently work with @DTube and @Steepshot and am looking to expand to help other projects and I think as a witness I could majorly influence helping more platforms build and grow on the Steemit. This is all very ambitious and far into the future. I realize that Steemit and Steem are not the same and most of my content is for Steemit, but I believe that the Steemit witnesses should be more for the people since some are inactive or don't do much on Steemit.
I also have a general question to pose.... as far as I know, every account gets 30 votes, so what stops anyone from making many accounts and voting for themself as a witness?
Every time I post I select 1 random winner from the upvotes, resteems, and comments totaling 3 winners and give them 0.01 SBD each and announce it on the next post! I also send out 0.001 weekly to followers! I use https://snackaholic.github.io/steemfortune/en/ by @snackaholic
The winners from the last post I made here:
Were:
@misinaelizaveta
@mytechtrail
@businesswri
Note that once I’ve posted a new post the contest is over and this could be subject to any amount of time up to but not longer than 7 days
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@DTube is an amazing platform meant as a decentralized solution to YouTube's copyright, censorship and monetization issues. We are building a community around the platform!
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@ScottCBusiness
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Proxy
Proxying your vote is pretty simple you just go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses navigate to the bottom and type in a username here:
I have started to take an active interest in Steem witnesses treating them as future global decentralized politics. If you don't want to learn or bother to stay up to date with it, but do not want your vote wasted then you can make me your proxy to vote on your behalf!
Delegation
📲 If you don’t always use your vote power or all your SP or just want to get upvoted regularly, you can delegate SP to me to receive upvotes on all your content
Use https://steembottracker.com/ to delegate any amount to me!
A nice post in my eyes 😊 Resteemed by @peekbit to say “thank you“ since you are one of my esteemed followers.
Read about my attempt in contributing to the bright side of life.
Some remarks about my resteeming.
Thanks! Cheers
Like your normal votes, Witness votes are based on SP you have. So what really matters is the amount of SP you have.
Thanks I figured that out just recently, appreciate the reinforcement on that :)
You're doing good work here - so much of an effort! I have selected your account to receive my vote from the smartsteem whitelist ✊
Thank you so much! I do my best :)
That's for sure! I sometimes lurk in the discord channel (as bushgrad). I see you interact diligently there too. When I have more time, I will try to learn and eventually lend a hand somehow.
Yeah I do try to! And awesome, glad to have you here!
Great post,Because your article is informative.
thanks I try!
Very informative and interesting. We are still quite new to steemit and learning more every day. Keep up the good work.
I will! Cheers
Thanks for your informative article.
Cheers :)
Thanks for the SBD. Do you know if I can add you as a proxy when I have used some of my votes?
Yeah you can, but it would reset your votes unfortunately to whatever mine are
Thanks, I will probably just follow along with your witness research postings.
Sounds good :) Got to make sure we do our part!
I have already voted for 18, so looking forward to your thoughts on others I could support.
Awesome!
Good jop my frend
thanks so much!
I interested of your bid..but to get 30 votes wheter we have to change our SBD before?
And about your question,I think it's a good idea to stop making many account then voting for ourself as a witness
You automatically start with 30 votes for free
Okay..I will trying to link the website.thanks alot
Cheers
thanks @scottcbusiness, I got new knowledge from this post .
Nice share
Awesome, cheers!