How to vote for a witness and why!

Recently team VIVA setup @viva.witness with the help of @someguy123
This node is on a high end server with oodles of ram and diskspace etc and it's being professionally managed by @someguy123 under our direction.

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But what is a witness?

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Witnesses are guardians of the blockchain!
Witnesses are responsible for finding blocks, seeding the blockchain and setting pricing feeds and interest rates. They are for the most part silent and you never really hear much about them. But they represent a major investment in the steem economy in terms of money and manpower.

With steem, the witnesses take turns finding blocks. But your priority as a witness is determined by how many votes as witness you get and the relative stake power behind those votes.

You as an end user can vote for up to 30 witnesses and you can change your witness vote at any time for any reason.
Voting for a witness is a way of saying "I support your work. I like what you're doing and I want you to continue doing it."
Conversely, removing your vote from a witness is a good way to let them know that you no longer agree with them or their policies.

As @the-ego-is-you mentioned earlier, there has been a lot of back and forth lately between some of the witnesses and some people find this to be toxic.

You can show your support or lack thereof, by voting for witnesses that represent your interests.
In this way, the witness system also serves as a sort of mini-political system.

I have no illusions of running for office. I don't now if you agree or disagree with my politics or not. However my group @vivacoin has recently launched a new exchange where you can buy and sell STEEM along with other currencies.

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Deposit a dollar, get back a dollar. It's a simple concept really.

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What makes TradeQwik really special is that all market pegged instruments are fungible. That means if you want to deposit your SBD you get USD credit directly and if you want to withdraw your USD you can do so as SBD, or as cash at our ATMs or just put it on your debit card (yes we issue debit cards).

bitUSD and several others are on the horizon as well.

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Why vote for @viva.witness?

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• We're providing a dollar backed price feed for SBD and STEEM and there are 0 trading fees on limit orders at this time.
• Our price feed will be market driven straight off of TradeQwik and as TradeQwik and VIVA grow, so too will steem.
• The price feed we publish, is the price the market actually supports and we are willing and able to buy and sell at the price we publish.

*TradeQwik is also the only exchange that powers up our entire cold wallet and uses that to upvote our customers. We plan to market this feature heavily in the coming months, to markets outside of the normal cypherpunk/cryptonerd realm, which will bring additional business to the platform. Voting for @viva.witness shows us that you support the idea of bringing steem to the masses.

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Why did VIVA setup a witness in the first place?

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In order to accomplish all this, we determined that it would be best if we were to take a more active role in the steem economy at large. By setting up a witness, we are able to help stabilize the price and also we are able to gain a deeper insight into the wants and needs of the community.

So I'm going to ask for your witness vote if you think what we are doing is a good thing.
But more than that, I'm going to teach you how to vote for witnesses and I'm going to ask you to research every witnesses on the list and ask yourself if you support them, or if your vote would better be spent on someone else?

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How do we vote for witnesses?

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First go to the "hamburger menu" in the upper right hand corner of the screen and click to open the flyout menu.

Next go about 3/4ths of the way down and click "Vote for Witnesses"

This will bring up the witness voting screen.

I'd like you to spend some time here. These are the top 50 witnesses. Get to know them. You can vote for 30 of them and there isn't a good reason for you not to be doing this. These guys represent you and your interests at great expense to themselves.
Right now though, @viva.witness is not listed.
But don't despair, if you'd like to vote for our witness, just scroll down a little bit and find the box and fill it out.

It's really that easy!

Now a few final words about witnessing in general. Setting up and maintaining a witness node is a huge responsibility. But if you're planning to run a business that directly interfaces with the steem ecosystem, there is no better way to do it than as a witness.

Our good friend @someguy123 has made a habit of under promising and over delivering in this department. He's the guy who created "steem in a box" which you can use free of charge.

He works tirelessly on products that make steem easier to deploy and his stuff just works with very minimal configuration. However if you're considering running a witness node for yourself and you don't really have the time or expertise to devote to the 24/7 headaches that come with this commitment, I highly recommend you hire him to set it up and run it according to your needs and tastes. He's literally the best sysadmin I've ever met and his prices are extremely reasonable and well deserved.

In my next topic, I'm going to share the list of witnesses I support and explain why. But I don't want to influence you as a new voter at this stage. Explore the various witnesses, read their reports, see how they're doing and give them your upvotes. Maybe pop into their threads sometime and let them know you're supporting them and why.

Thank you for reading this and remember like always...
This post is 100% steem powered!