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RE: Witness Questionnaire - A Solution for Voter Confusion?
An active (top 19) witness is a special "elected" form of miner and earns more rewards. With Steem the POW mining is separated from the the actual production of blocks. The majority of rewards come from the block production which needs to be very consistent to keep Steemit working properly - this is what the witnesses do. The regular miners take care of the POW component. This is my understanding but please correct me if I am wrong.
In analogy, the top 19 witnesses are the police squad that control the blockchain to prevent it doing unwanted things, like, for example, forking.
Therefore witnesses are rewarded to compensate their own time, money and resources in having their nodes running 24/7 without any excuse on a low-latency server. The rest of the network has to follow those witnesses, and to avoid corruption, every round, a random backup witness is chosen to monitor the witnesses themselfs.
If for example, with the next upcoming hardfork, none of the witnesses upgrade to the new chain, steemit will remain on the old chain, or things will get very messy soon. Witnesses have the responsability to accept upgrades and updates for this community and the blockchain, along with controling multiple parameters like SBD intrest rate, account creation fee, publishing on regular intervals the current price feed, and so on.
According to the whitepaper, a witness could be considered an employee of steem working around the clock to keep the motors running.
Thanks for providing a proper explanation:)
I'm sure it's not proper like for example smooth or ned would explain, but it should help clearing things up :-)