HBD STEEM! Thanks for this message by No.4 witness @good-karma

Last week was FULL of research and learning..

What is good friends? Happy Monday to you all and Happy 2nd Birthday this past weekend to STEEM! My intention for this post is to spread awareness and inspire greater care for the future of our baby blockchain. I wish to re-mind us of the importance of community and specifically about supporting our beloved witnesses.

Warning: This is a long one! It requires some attention, so please get comfy and settle in. So you have got a light at the end of the tunnel, I did my best to keep my explanations short and address the topic in 4 easy steps! 🙇

"Decentralization" is just a useless buzz-word without participation. - @ancapbarbie

Thanks to @ancapbarbie who I met on PYPT last week for speaking about this in her post. Also @thekittygirl for her swift summary and where you can listen to the full audio of the meeting. The above comment struck a cord with me and grounded the reality we face as a decentralized network.

It is 100% up to us to take collective action and communicate with each other about the problems we face. Sure we're only Steemit toddlers and like many of you, I'm not even coherently creating consistent content yet. I have fumbled around finding my voice and even found myself in some flagging mischief myself. That's all fine and part of our individual growing process.

However as a self-correcting community we must be ready to unite, evolve and embrace our accelerating learning. We must be ready to fully participate in our collective crypto-future!

What is The "Witness Situation" you speak of?

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The majority of common users might perceive everything as fine. Sure we had some laggy spells and older whales did abit of circle-jerking stuff that our youngest don't even understand. Everyday minnows are generally so focused on building their following, rewards and voting power to pause for anything else. While most of us have moony dreams of mass adoption and sky high STEEM prices, at the same time we have on-boarding issue nearing a month wait for some new users. It's no surprise there's a lot of issues behind the scenes that we, the minnow masses don't even know about.

If we are to be life in and see the highest potential of our platform, we must be vigilant and purposeful with our processes. Even those of us who are not at all tech savvy still want to empower others and improve our experience on the blockchain right? So we must pay attention to the inner workings of our system. At such an important stage of our growth we have to instill positive behavior and nip poor practices in the bud..

Step 1: Vote For Witnesses!

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Wait what is a witness?

Simple Definition: A STEEM witness is a person whom operates a witness server (which produces blocks), and publishes a price feed of STEEM/USD to the network. - @someguy123 Witness No.11

Ok so you didn't even know what a witness was, how anyone can become one and that we should be doing our part to research and support those that we align with? What are they doing to help Steemit grow and serve the greater whole? Who's engaged with the community and who's interests do they hold highest? What happens when witnesses stop witnessing? Is it even important to me, I'm just a minnow?

Well don't worry we are all in this together and after this post you too will know what we can do to help. It all comes down to a willingness to ask questions and research. I've learned so much since my first post about witnesses and I've promoted the witnesses I do support in my footer for months. To be clear, witnesses are literally the keepers of our blockchain and everything would grind to a halt without them! So yes even though minnow votes do not count as much as whale votes in terms of SP, I see them as even more important to our freedom and liberty.

Current participation in witness voting is very low with only about 15,000 accounts out of over 387,000 making even one vote equal to about 3.6% participation. - @jerrybanfield Witness No.22

For example 10,000 x 1 SP minnow votes supporting a witness gives them much more stability and in turn our blockchain becomes a much more secure democracy. As opposed to the current oligarchy where a 1 x 10,000 SP whale vote that can be dropped and changed at any moment, gives some whales a LOT of influence/control over their chosen witnesses and their actions. Specifically when it comes to any Hard Fork implementation that may or may not serve the masses, more on that later.

While most top 20 witnesses are deserving and earning more than enough SP to compensate their efforts, how do they rank up and stay up at the top of the charts? This brings us to our next dilemma..

Politics and Hard Forks.

Step 2: Dead Witness Voting?

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Did you know that out of 400+ registered witness nodes, only 125 are active?

Did you know all Hard Forks must be veto approved by only the Top 20 witnesses?

The "Official" witness voting page only shows the top 50 though? See for yourself at https://steemit.com/~witnesses

I had been placing my votes this way this whole time. While researching I saw that some of the top 50 didn't really post about witnessing or even campaign for any votes, weird right? I only found out that we had so many witnesses by searching for server reports and community projects. Eventually I managed to fill all of my 30 votes with witnesses I believed in. This process in, stages took a few weeks and included a dozen from outside the top 50. It is simple though time consuming..

I realized this is not what most minnows would be interested in and..

I never thought twice about the wider problems this set up causes, until now..

Every Steemit user is entitled to 30 votes to elect 30 witnesses.. These blockchain witnesses are expected to keep a node running every second of every day. Most Steem witnesses actively engage in the Steemit community, a reason why many users have upvoted them. In fact you can be upvoted as well if you're ready to take on that position. - @steemitguide

Now the truth is unfolding that many of our younger witness are drowning in data, running servers at a financial loss and dropping blocks. Hearing their struggles to rank up and be rewarded for their service has made this situation all the more real.

Many witnesses have been busy upgrading their servers from 32GB RAM to 64GB RAM to keep up with our ever growing hashing demands. This is a costly upgrade for anyone attempting to survive on their STEEM rewards full-time. Additionally with the current dip in the market amplifying pressure, some of our younger witnesses are struggling to break even. Many have turned to running bid-bots and loaning SP delegations, which is a topic for another day.

My point is how do we expect to grow the platform exponentially when there is no real incentive for witnesses to run servers? How long will our witnesses be able to self fund the blockchain we are all relying on? Especially since many of us have high hopes for the success of STEEM long-term.

Do you wish there was a simple way to learn more about witnesses.. all of the witnesses?

A place to add and remove votes as well as follow links to witness accounts?

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Thanks to @shadowspub for taking the initiative and holding a witness panel, this is her post about it with more links to other attendees feedback posts. From it I learned about the "@drakos list", he's one of our top witnesses and helps a lot of people across the platform. I've been supporting his witness for months and he continues to bring solutions to our problems. This list is an incredible resource showing us with full transparency all of the practical and real-time witness data.

What became alarmingly clear was how many witnesses listed are actually dead! Meaning their servers have been inactive or switched off and all our votes allocated to them are effectively dead too WTF!? These votes could make all the difference for younger witnesses to climb the ranks and get paid. While improving our blockchain with better maintained hardware and a more diverse, engaged and conscientious witness base.

The next panel discussion hosted on the Steemit Ramble discord will be 21-Apr-2018 at 1500 UTC. All are welcome to join and are encouraged to get involved in this discussion.

This is a massive learning opportunity for all Steemians to communicate directly with our witnesses. Community leaders please consider attending to empower yourselves as well as educate and inform your wider groups.

Step 3: The Ol' Boys Whales Club

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Whale to witness relationships have become reminiscent of bankers to politicians.

Many of the dead witness accounts were from the early days when mining STEEM was a thing. Some of those earliest adopters stayed on and are now in huge positions. However times are changing and with it being a silent witness is no longer cutting it. The community wants to be more informed of the technical developments.

It's important for witnesses to be engaged and active in the community, not faceless Illuminati wannabes. To show up and share what they are doing in service to STEEM and Steemit. For us to get to know who is representing our interests as a community. We want to be able to offer feedback on our experiences and know our voices will considered when adopting future Hard Forks for example.

Dead server owners are clearly not honoring their role or showing up for the community. Even more worrying is many of our highest ranking witnesses and heavy SP holders are still voting for these dead witnesses. Surely this is a major flaw in the system right now? Am I right in seeing this, are any witnesses willing to drop in the comments and educate us? Perhaps even @dan @ned @gtg @smooth @freedom @pumpkin et al.?

Could this be an innocent mistake by us voters? Of course we are all free to vote for whoever we like, for whatever reason. However what benefit are the dead guys bringing to the platform? Other than blocking the path for fresh talent and slowing our expansion? How would those who didn't even know about witnesses, know that politics are afoot among them? Surely those higher "vested" in SP know better? Surely witnesses will be the first to be vocal about any potential problem right? Lulz..

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I had a talk with a few people and asked them why they are voting for dead witnesses. Their answer was basically to keep other people from moving 'up the board'. Seriously? - @enginewitty Witness No.100

There seems to be a lot of money involved with being a top 20 witness, current estimates around the tune of $3k~ SP per week. Remember when we were up over $8 USD/SP? Yeah $24,000 USD per week is an executive level incentive to hodl your position. Is it possible that in exchange for heavily vested votes, favors might be arranged? Is it likely Hard Fork adoption could be swayed in favor of those who are sponsored by whale sized witness votes?

These are all relevant questions to ponder and I am looking forward to read @sircork's soon to be released analysis report of the cross voting data. More importantly for now, how are we going to move forwards and take action to reclaim democracy?

Witnesses like @ura-soul have proposed fixes to this situation for months, however any changes would require Hard Fork approval.

The Witness voting system is weighted so that those voters with the most Steem Power have the most capacity to influence the vote results. It is possible for people to invest large amounts of money into Steem Power, vote for a witness and then never again interact with the community. This is a problem in that while the witnesses who receive the votes may have been the best option at the time the vote was made, over time they may neglect their position and yet maintain their top position in the ranks anyway. If the heavy weight voter never returns to Steemit (perhaps even because they are deceased) - then their vote weight will continue to effect the future of Steemit, even in the face of consistently poor decisions being made by the witnesses they voted for. - @ura-soul Witness No.77

Are the Top 20 witnesses going to action any of these changes? This is not like voting for some corrupt government, this is our transparent blockchain. Are our STEEM witnesses in favor of the minnow community or the whale minority?

Above all, none of these questions matter if you're not even participating..

Will you vote or will you be sitting there complaining?

Step 4: What's A Proxy?

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Ok first let's give ourselves a pat on the back for getting through this post, we almost there! Thank you for your attention and trust me, it wasn't the easiest one to put together either.

Basically setting a proxy is trusting a friend to vote for you, essentially ceding your witness voting authority to your proxy (nothing to do with your upvotes). This is useful if you don't have the time or interest in constantly researching and determining who are the best witnesses.

Proxy or not to proxy? I've been back and forth about this, I feel it just comes down to personal circumstance and there's no right or wrong in my opinion. Your proxy can always be revoked whenever you want to take over your votes again. My preference is not to proxy as I like knowing exactly where my votes are going and I actually enjoy researching the ecosystem for all the amazing projects emerging here.

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While I feel proxy'ing does not inspire people to learn more and research their witnesses. The real talk is not everyone is going to do it anyway, period. Most casual users don't have the time, they enjoy engaging with the community and creating content, that's all. The politics is not fun or appealing and whale intimidation is a real factor. However most are not even going to read this post in it's entirety, that's just the way the internet is let's face it.

So in those cases, I'd 100% prefer people to proxy vote than not at all! I am happy being a proxy myself, simply because I know I am constantly scrutinizing, revising and reviewing my votes. In my next post I will be profiling all the witnesses I currently vote for and explaining why I've given my support. (I'm currently revising a few of my older votes).

I'd be honored to be your proxy too and will take care of your votes as my own. It's more proactive for us to campaign for our witnesses and earn then extra proxy votes than no votes at all.

No action, no change, no voice..

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How do we set a proxy? Setting your proxy is super simple thankfully! Go to the witness voting page and scroll to the bottom. There is a box just the same as voting for any non-top 50 witness. Set your proxy, confirm your password and forget you ever read this disgustingly long article! Win/win for all! 😍

Congrats you made it to the end, thanks again for your time!

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SMG is a mutual support and curation group. Apply for membership here:

That's all for today, thanks for sharing your valuable time current. Drop a comment if you vibe with these conversations and appreciate Steemit for rewarding content creators. Thanks to YouTube for hosting our archives and please subscribe for more live streams on Twitch

Thanks 🙏🏻 for the top comments and votes on my previous post. Please check in with these generous hearts, who are all sharing STEEM love in their own ways: @sourceoftruth @mikeycinmountp @artemislives @rodeo670 @soundwavesphoton @flauwy @flipstar @hungryhustle @richardcrill @iliasdiamantis and more.

We've also been learning about bid-bots and the community projects they sponsor. I've decided to support and delegate to: @honestbot @msp-bidbot @therising @minnowsupport @smartsteem @buildawhale

Bless all watchers and truthers in the now, we're the change we are looking for. Awakening awareness, consciousness and compassion. Be love and be loved. Thanks for helping us continue "playing the game" and sharing one love!

Wholeness & Loving Vibrations! 💚💯

TWATTER | FAKEBOOK | INSTAGAME

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_{The Drakos list is our best resource for fully up-to-date witness info here ✅
Witnesses are the keepers of our blockchain and we can support them by voting here ✅
@aggroed @arcange @ats-witness @ausbitbank @drakos @enginewitty @followbtcnews @furion @fyrst-witness @good-karma @gtg @guiltyparties @jesta @lukestokes.mhth @neoxian @netuoso @ocd-witness @patrice @pfunk @pharesim @reggaemuffin @roelandp @sircork @someguy123 @swelker101 @teamsteem @themarkymark @timcliff @ura-soul @yabapmatt}