Witness voting -- Voting for Witnesses Help?
I have been a member since July that's 8 months on Steemit, I think I am a good member I do what I am supposed to by voting, commenting, writing sort of good posts and being polite to other members. I have spent the 8 month trying to understand the whole process, its starting to become easier, I have yet to cash out as to scared to do it and actually can't see me doing it for a while so by them maybe the process will have changed for the better Easier
How many votes do we have?
Why do we need witnesses?
How do we vote for them?
How many witnesses are there?
What makes a good witness?
What do we need to look out for? *
If any Witnesses want to join in and tell us why we should vote for you then please do. Any information you can give will help me and others a lot. I have seen posts from witnesses telling us what they are doing but still doesn't tell me why I should vote for them against someone else.
@williambanks gave me this link that will help with any questions about witnesses. :)
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@williambanks/how-to-vote-for-a-witness-and-why
@timcliff also has a post that gives lots of information
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@timcliff/witness-voting-guide
@skyochica Has a post out explaining a lot, this post is 5 months old so some of the figures might not be correct.
https://steemit.com/witness/@sykochica/what-s-a-steem-witness-and-why-should-we-care
Here is the link to all the Witnesses, Not sure if you can vote for them on here.
https://steemd.com/witnesses
Thank you son-of-satire
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You need to vote for joseph because his valve runs cooler all the time, and you can also vote for 29 others, witnesses are the backbone of the blockchain. You think of the steem blockchain as a 20 Valve engine, if one of these valves performs poorly or breaks down, it can influence the overall performance of the engine, the steem witnesses job is to make sure the engine never breaks down, and all the valves work together in tandem. Every post, upvote, Tx you make on the steem network has to go through one of these valves and be approved by the others.
Thank you for that, it was very helpful, so I gather you are a witness :)
Yes I am the #12 Valve right now, valves change places depending on how much votes they get and how much SP those votes control. Being a witness is not as easy as it sounds, there is a lot of updating and maintenance involved, it was much harder in the early days, because of the frequent updates and fixes, much better now because there is much less to fix in terms of bugs, and more tweaking of variables. I remember in the early days witnesses having to update 3 times in one day. I hope those days do not come back :D
Well you have been very helpful to me, I will vote for you. Thank you :)
Thanks, do not listen to those who say your vote does not count, every vote counts, it's true some more than others, but the way the system is designed, authors and active users are supposed to have bigger and bigger share of the decision making by building up their SP. This will take long, but with every SP someone gains their vote influence goes up by 1 SP, and like pfunk said if you add all that together with the others, it can add to a lot.
I have given you one of my votes, I hope it helps and thank you :)
You need to vote for the witnesses you believe are good for this community. That means you will have to make a small research first and you have to have trust in that person who is a witness. I think that will be the best way to vote.
Which witnesses are here from the beginning, what they did or do for this community, etc! When you decide which are the best for you and for this platform, then you should vote for them! Great post, Karen!
Thank you. I will do more research with my votes I have left, 25 to be exact lol maybe I should sell to the highest bidder :)
:))) you can do that too! I'm curious who will bid more!
Maybe I will set up an auction :)
as far as i know you can vote for a max of 30 witnesses, or at least that is what it tells me when i click on it...i was also trying to ask questions about this earlier to try and understand more.. i guess witnesses run the servers that this wonderful website operates on? from what i understand.. so in that case YES they are VERY important and vital to success of steemit! :) u just click on 'vote for witnesses' on the top right in the menu there and then upvote them and the arrow will turn blue after you vote them,.. i voted for people who i liked or thought were very active members of the community , and i even voted for some who i had no idea who they were too!
updated here is the link that I was given a day ago to give me some more info on witnesses and what they do :) https://steemit.com/steemit-guides/@pfunk/a-full-steemit-user-s-guide-to-steem-witnesses
Oh so I click on the 3 lines in the right hand corner scroll down to vote for witness, yay that was easy. Wow you get to chose 30, that is a lot, I will got have a look and see who appeals to me. Thank you @doitvoluntarily that was a massive help :)
yes you get lots of choices! haha
Now it depends who pays me the most money for my vote hahah
Here is a guide to help with some of your questions:
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@timcliff/witness-voting-guide
HI, Thank you for that, I can't reply on there but I have upvoted, would you mind if I placed your link into my post for others to benefit from?
Sure, go for it :)
Thank you :)
I've been looking at my witness list lately between what's been going on and some of them saying they weren't going to run their node anymore. While the witness voting is weighted by how much SP you hold, like @pfunk said, the sum of many smaller votes do add up and can have an effect, especially in the bottom ranks of the top 19.
While weighted, this is a major way for the community at large to express their views on what changes are approved and to some degree the direction the site takes (since accepting a hard fork requires enough votes from witnesses.)
However, along these lines, I would like to gain a better understanding of how each witness views various issues and their own vision of things. While I've not clicked through every one on the list as of yet, so far the witness threads I've seen are haven't been updated in a while and I'd personally like to see this change.
If it's helpful to add to the list of explaining witness stuff, I made a post months back on it specifically for the mentor group I was a part of at the time:
https://steemit.com/witness/@sykochica/what-s-a-steem-witness-and-why-should-we-care
This was before the economic changes kicked in, so the numbers are definitely out of date which also changes certain aspects of the criteria included in there, but I do think many of the concepts still hold true.
If interested, my witness votes can be seen on [my steemd profile,] but again I do expect these to be changing (at least slightly) in the near future as I think things over.
I wanted to edit this in here. Timcliff has and still does a great job to help provide us with updates from witnesses into a more consolidated place. His latest post on witness reports can be viewed here as well as a history of these under the tag reportsfromthewitnesses.
You can also follow witness updates in general through the witness-category tag.
Thank you for this, I have read your post and voted but can't reply. Why is there so many members wanting to be witnesses when there is a top 15 . Can I add this link to my post, juts think its so much easier having all the links together getting all the information people need :)
Yea, I think comments aren't allowed after an amount of time (which may be changed with an future hard fork.) To answer your question:
Technically it's the top 19. Witness are paid for each block they produce. Every 'round' which is over 63 seconds, there are 21 blocks that are created. From these 21 blocks, each of the top 19 witnesses are guaranteed be assigned to create 1. One is assigned to a miner in the mining queue (so this gets spread around between those that sign up for this...I believe.) The remaining block gets assigned to a backup witness that is outside of the top 19, so they don't get one every round. However the more witness votes (proportionally) determines how often that backup witness will be selected for that extra block. Hence the person at witness rank 20 will get the block more often than a person ranked 35 (of course assuming the don't have the same weighted witness votes, which I've never seen happen and doubt will happen.)
Yep, feel free to use the link. Hope it's helpful...I'd just recommend a disclaimer that the specific numbers are off (i.e. how much witnesses make) since pre-dating the economic changes. I did edit it the post at the time with the comments that were given to make it as correct as possible for the time.
Thank you that helps. I have added the link saying the numbers may have changed. Thanks again :)
Hello @karenb54 , put in a simple way: witnesses are those who provide the technical support for this platform to work, they are voted in so that it is completly descentralized, witnesses vote on certain issues that are important for all users: APR paid to SBD holders, price feed STM/SBD, account creation fee.. etc
I am currently witness number #41, if you wish you can vote for me :)
For further questions you can also reach me on steemit.chat
I will def check you out :)
Excellent post dear friend @ karenb54, this should be the question of many people. Thank you for sharing your concerns, with so many respects it will surely serve many people
Your more than welcome @jlufer :)
@karenb54 I hope you'll consider giving @viva.witness one of your witness votes. Here's a guide on how to vote on witnesses who are not in the top 50...
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@williambanks/how-to-vote-for-a-witness-and-why
I hope that's helpful!
Thank you @williambanks I will check that link out now :)
Upvoted and resteemed! Great Job @karenb54
Thank you @tradeqwik :)
I really need to stop a second and check who I'm logged in as when commenting & resteeming. But you're very welcome @karenb54. Feel free to stop by tradeqwik.com where we power up our cold wallet and use it to upvote our most active traders. Also feel free to drop into https://chat.vivaco.in any time to talk to us.
I will check it out thank you. :)
Witness voting is still subject to steem power. If all us minnows vote against a witness it only takes one whale to screw us over.
Fear not. Steem will not change, things will continue as normal until the dev's really screw us over in the next hardfork,
Just saying.
I hope that doesn't happen, I will have to be wary who I vote for, maybe we should sell our votes to the highest bidder lol