I just went from zero knowledge/bafflement about what a witness is to having I think a reasonable basic idea about it, thanks for the post!

The thought that does immediately spring to my mind though is, is there no way the witnesses can be rewarded in an automatic way for the critical work they do? The problem that I am seeing here is simply that you explain that people generally are lacking awareness of the witnesses and so are unlikely to be rewarding them therefore. I guess there's probably a reason for this approach that is not yet clear to me, so I ask the question partly in an effort to improve my understanding.