vULOG 137 - What Steem Witnesses are doing in simple words

View this post on Hive: vULOG 137 - What Steem Witnesses are doing in simple words

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Hey guys this is Quoc Huy, Steem Witness, today I just wanted to try to explain to you guys what the Witnesses on Steam are doing, what are the jobs.

I will try to explain that in less technical way as possible and because of that I might skip details just to really tell you in a nutshell what Witnesses are. So when you go on steemit.com or any other decentralized app like busy.org, steempeak.com, fundition.io or anything, any operation you do like posting, commenting, upvoting, doing a transfer etc needs to be approved and also witnessed by a machine that we called the Witness node and basically, for example, when you post something there must be a software that checks whether or not your account has sufficient resources credits or RC in order to perform the operation. Or if you have enough Steem in order to transfer some money to another account and all those checks and approvals are performed on the witness server and the witness server runs a software called steemd which allows the server to verify all those rules. So this is basically what a Witness does.

I am a witness but I’m not doing the actual verification, it’s my server it’s the software that is running on my server that does it for me.

Also the important thing about witnessing is the electronic signature that the witness server the witness software is adding to any transaction. It’s a little bit like when you are signing a contract with another person let's say: I am buying a house, I, the buyer, sign a contract with the seller saying that I am transferring a certain amount of money to their account. And usually when you signed that kind of contract you have a third-party that needs to witness the transaction. So this is what we are doing because when you are doing a transaction an operation on the Steem blockchain, let say you want to transfer 10 SBD to someone else then one of the Witnesses will witness the transaction and will sign it to basically stamp it so that the next time when you come back “hey I have a proof that I've done the transaction and this is signed by witness that people are trusting on the blockchain”.

So this basically what witnesses are doing. Very basic information, you can learn more and maybe I'll go into details in a future video. Thanks for watching

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Summary of some of my other contributions

Project	Description	Link
Steemed Phish	Chrome browser extension to make external links more visible and alert you on Phishing/Scamming links	Steemed Phish
Dtube Community Support	This project by @evildido allows users to run their own IPFS node and pin videos in order to cache them for longer. Dtube has the tendency of deleting non-popular video after few days only. I helped Dockerizing the project for an easier deployment on almost any platform. I've also contributed by running two nodes, one in Australia and one in Canada to cache #teamaustralia and #teamnz videos.	Dockerizing Dtube Community Support
DiscoSteem Bot	This is a Discord/Steem bot project by @planetenamek. When I started Steemulant Bot for the Vietnamese community, I didn't know the existence of DiscoSteem Bot and wanted something written in NodeJS. I've ended up continuing my own project as it contains code and logic for personal use and for the Vietnamese community. But I've decided to share some useful features that can benefit the users of DiscoSteem Bot and will continue to add more functionalities as I go.	Dockerizing DiscoSteem Bot
A Dollar A Day	This is a project run by @pennsif and will donate 15 SBD every day to a charity	"A dollar a day" fundraiser - Karaoke Singing: Le chanteur malheureux
Team Vietnam	I started a new Vietnamese community on Discord and developed @teamvn, a community bot to help grow the Vietnamese community and help them create higher quality content.
POCKET-JS	This is my Javascript (NodeJS) port of the POCKET confirmer by @biophil. POCKET is an experimental crypto token on top of STEEM.	POCKET-JS Confirmer
Skippy Bot	I've written this Discord bot for @teamaustralia, it has three main features: a level bot (like Tatsumaki but with Australian animal images), a chatter bot and a footer banner generator for both @teamaustralia, @teamnz and @steemph	Witness Update 2018-07-30 - Team Australia's Skippy Bot

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Credits

• The image at the top has been generated with the Canva app using my own photo.

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▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS