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What are witnesses?

As the rising price of SBD lures more and more people to platform I feel like voting for witnesses is something that gets overlooked by a large number of people. Either people are unaware they are able to or they just don't know enough about the people/platform to feel confident voting. 

So what does a witness do? Here is a little information pulled directly from the steem whitepaper.

 SP holders elect individuals, called witnesses, to publish price feeds. The elected witnesses are presumably trusted by those who have a vested interest in the quality of the feed. By paying those who are elected, Steem creates market competition to earn the right to produce feeds. The more the feed producers are paid the more they have to lose by publishing false information. 

 Conceptually, the consensus algorithm adopted by Steem is similar to the consensus algorithm adopted by companies throughout the world. People with a vested interest in the future value of Steem vote to  select individuals responsible for including testimony in the public record. Voting is weighted proportional to each individual's vested interest. 

  With Steem, block production is done in rounds. Each round 21 witnesses are selected to create and sign blocks of transactions. Nineteen (19) of these witnesses are selected by approval voting, one is selected by a computational proof-of-work, and one is timeshared by every witness that didn’t make it into the top 19 proportional to their total votes. The 21 active witnesses are shuffled every round to prevent any one witness from constantly ignoring blocks produced by the same witness placed before. 

Sound a bit too technical? I think @pfunk summed it best in a post he did last year when he said-

 Witnesses are generally voted for because they are trusted members of the community, positively contribute to Steem and Steemit in many ways, are qualified and experienced in administration of servers, and are experienced in cryptocurrency networks and software. 

So with some of that background out of the way I wanted to share why you should be voting for @patrice and how criminally underrated she is currently sitting at witness # 63. You can find the full list of witnesses and where they stand here.

Why @patrice?

So why do I think Patrice is worthy of being a witness? Well for starters I agree with @pfunk, I think a witness should be a trusted member of the community who contributes in multiple ways and I can't think of anyone who fits that bill better than she does. Here are 3 reasons why I am voting for her and you should as well.

All Steemit, all the time

My first pro-patrice argument is that she focuses full time on Steemit. While I don't think that is a necessity to be a good witness I feel it is definitely a plus to have someone who does this as more than a part time hobby. Someone who dedicates that kind of time to platform has more incentive than most to watch it succeed.

Multiple projects that are bettering the community

Secondly, when we talk about people who contribute to the community in different ways I haven't met anyone here who seems to be involved in as many projects as Patrice. She is an integral part of @steemcleaners and I am not exaggerating when I say that I am not sure we could function without her. For those unaware, steemcleaners is an initiative to clean up plagiarism, identity theft, and other forms of abuse on Steemit. Besides putting in the time to do the behind the scenes work she is very available across all the chats to talk with people and help them resolve whatever issues they may be having. 

One of the complaints we get about steemcleaners is that we either go too far or not far enough. People don't always understand that we are just a group of people who joined together to create a group to fight a few very specific things. We encourage people to form their own groups to deal with issues that are outside of our scope and most people find this too daunting and just continue to grumble about things without being proactive. Patrice is not one of those people and she helped to form and organize @spaminator. From the intro post, the goal of Spaminator is pretty clear-

 It doesn't matter how you dress it up spam is spam.  My goal is to root it out and remove the financial rewards of those spamming for profit. 

It started small but has slowly grown over the past few months. If you are a fan of new, original, non-spam content getting rewarded on Steemit then @patrice is the witness for you.

Just a good person with the traits I want in a witness

Lastly, in all the interactions I have had with Patrice she has come off as a genuinely good person. She has shown patience when interacting with people that I would have flipped out on. She has a measure of power and influence through her associations with groups on Steemit and always uses it responsibly. Problem solving, diplomacy, fairness, technical knowledge, and love of animals, all the traits required of a witness and a bonus one. There isn't a person that I trust more to objectively steer this platform in the right direction. 

If you want to check out her witness thread you can find it here- https://steemit.com/witness-category/@patrice/patrice-witness-application and learn a little bit more about her. To actually vote for a witness use the pull down menu at the top right of your screen and select vote for witness

Hopefully you learned a little something and take my advice to vote for some worthy witnesses. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have and always appreciate feedback in the comments.