RE: Steemit Newbie FAQ - Witnesses: What Are They And Why Should You Care
If i understand well a witness can break or make you?
Nope, it's not like that :)
All the data in the Steemit.com website is saved in the blockchain, and the blockchain is, well, a structure of chained blocks.
To make sure the blocks which are containing posts, votes, comments and transactions are correct, we use this mechanism, called Delegated Proof of Stake, in which persons who own good equipment and who run a specific version of the steemd server, are validating them. Validation is important for transactions, primarily, to avoid double spending or other nasty stuff, but also for voting, etc.
This validation happens extremely fast and it's done by the program, the witness is just making sure the program is running correctly. Each block take no more than 3 seconds to be validated. Witnesses are taking turns.
In order to incentivize witnesses to do this thing, to take care of the platform, the blockchain is paying them. For each block a witness gets approx 1 Steem (but it gets a bit more complex than that).
So a witness is just a person who supervises a very performant equipment, which makes sure the data you're sending - posts, comments, votes - is correctly stored in the blockchain.
Hope it makes more sense now.
Feel free to ask more questions, if you need to.
I guess i will have an other 1001 questions :-) but so far so good i think i understand. You answered me accurate and so far as i know wright, so far more as others did where i wrote replies to, is that a reason to choose you as witness. Or have i got to choose my witness with more care ?
You should chose your witness based on the following:
You can see some of these props (missed blocks, ranking, price feed) in any block explorer, but I recommend this: https://steemd.com/witnesses
Steem on!