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RE: What do you look for in a witness?
So, what do you look for in a witness?
Great initiative! But you need to make clear that is no optimal set of
criteria to pick witnesses. Instead, everyone has it's own criteria.
Hence, what follows is the set of criteria that I use to decide whether
or not to upvote a witness.
- reliabe block production (this kind of includes 'latency')
- reliable price fee
- solid backup solution that does not sign multiple blocks with the same key
- active in the community
- active in development
- active in bug fixing
- on-time updates on network upgrades
- reachability on network issues (shouldn't happen to often anylonger)
You get a bonus from me if:
- If you are known from the BitShares community
- you have proven to be reliable in BitShares as a witness
Cheers
IMHO, this is an ideal list of attributes a witness should have in theory. But in practice, what I observe is that a number of witnesses are voting for witnesses with high vesting stakes, in the hope that their votes would be returned in favour. And they do return the favour. This leads to a situation where a circle of rich witnesses voting for each other.
... pretty much the same thing as if a miner in
Bitcoin buys more mining hardware than others. They have more vested
interest and would like to control as well as benefit more than others.
IMHO
Yeah I have seen this too, but it could be a symptom of a community which has a relatively high ratio of witnesses to users. Hopefully, as new users come on board and are provided with good organized information, they can begin making informed decisions and influencing the platform.
Most witnesses are also large miners and have a large stake. In BitShares we didn't have this kind of behavior because the witnesses were generally poor relative to everyone else.
I would say that witnesses should avoid behaviors that undermine the value of Steem. This means their voting record, curation record, censorship record, and general behavior in public matters.
I'm still deciding on witnesses and this was useful.
Thanks! I will update the try to update the OP to better reflect that.