The Steem Blockchain

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I received many queries in particular one about a very special system that the Steem Blockchain deploys, the role of a witness. When we introduced @bitrocker2020 as a witness from #teammalaysia, many people were quite caught by the term. They thought that @bitrocker2020 is a representative from #teammalaysia to witness an event, perhaps in legal terms, as someone holding a watching brief.

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We all know that blockchains are called as such because blocks are being produced and to get that done, you need people to run computers. Steem uses this mechanism called Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS)

There are a few good articles being written about DPOS and I will not dwell into it.

Here are some of it:-
@dantheman
https://steemit.com/dpos/@dantheman/dpos-consensus-algorithm-this-missing-white-paper

by Bitshares.org
https://bitshares.org/technology/delegated-proof-of-stake-consensus/

Witnesses are voted into position and the top 19 witness are delegated to produce the blocks every round. 21 blocks are created each round and there is an interval of 3 seconds between each block. That being the case 19 blocks will be taken up leaving 2 blocks remaining. 1 block will be given to the backup witness while another 1 block will be given to the miner account.

What is required of a Witness

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If I can give an analogy to the role of a witness, he would be considered something like a Town Council. They are voted into their position by the members of the community. The same goes for witness. They are also voted by us, the people that exist in this ecosystem. They are usually the more well regarded members of the community, one that you trust.

They are supposed to ensure that they are competent enough to run the Steem note throughout the year. There are a few jobs that they are expected to carry out and it is as follows:-

i) Determine the minimum Steem Power to be deposit to create a Steem account.
ii) To provide an ongoing price feed of a Steem token in US Dollars.
ii) To set the interest rate for Steem Dollar.

For these services and running their witness node, they are given an incentive of 1 steem for each block that they produce.

How do I Vote for My Witness

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This is a sample witness list in https://steemd.com/witnesses

From the image above, you can see there are some information that is contained such as their approval votes and their misses. If a witness fails to produce a block, there will be no fees paid. To vote for a witness, here is the link

https://steemit.com/~witnesses

This is how a witness voting process is like. You can vote anytime and you can remove a vote anytime. If the witness no longer represent your position just like how a elected representative no longer represent your views you can choose to change your support.

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Why Participation is Important

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We see that witnesses do quite a number of jobs and they constantly do even more to convince the people that voted for them that they are worth keeping in the system and be paid for it. As the price of steem increases, the reward for these witnesses would also increase, which makes the role of top witness a very lucrative one.

In the actual world, we only have limited choices and in the last US election, it was choosing between Clinton or Trump. So, even if you hate both it is still a decision to make between choosing of the lesser evil. But in this system which I deem to be more democratic, voting and unvoting can be done and undone at any one time. There are far more choices to pick.

Source

If you have a query or issues that you require to be resolved and there is the one person that does over and above his normal call of duties, that person is deserving of being paid for his services at least from a very narrow and skewed view.

Exercise your right to vote.

credit to @zomagic