Mass Witness Accounts Disabled After the Blockchain Shutdown Yesterday
Looking at the witness list top 100 today, we can see that many witness accounts were disabled in the aftermath of the long blockchain shutdown yesterday. What happened?
The following witnesses have quit:
@clayop
@furion
@teamsteem
@aracange
@asbear
@firepower
@adsactly-witness
@liberosist
@dragosroua
@felixx
In total 10.
What happened?
What ever the reason, I think its a good moment to reflect on the responsibility of the witnesses AND the responsibility of the community to elect them. The witnesses are the ones that keep the blockchain running which is why the community has to make sure the right witnesses are selected. Any long time damage to the blockchain will result in a loss of price value. Like politics its important we keep updated about the witnesses and at the same time it is important that the witnesses let us know what they are doing and how well they are doing it.
@Fulltimegeek just announced that he would be running for a spot in the top 20 Join Fulltimegeek on his journey to become a top 20 witness.
The abilities of the witnesses
Yesterday it became clear how important it is that the top 20 witnesses should have the right technical skills. The incident of yesterday was caused by a constant being changed in the code that should have not been (from the official steemit blog). Although it's near impossible that such mistakes and bugs will happen in the future it is important that we have capable witnesses to go through the code and fix it as soon as possible, and in the best case prevent it from ever happening.
What I have learned from this
I have been already been more consious about the votes I give to witnesses, and have already unvoted a few. After yesterday I will be more stricter with my witness voting. After all the vote will count for the well being of the Steem blockchain.
Tbh a resourceful person can be a great witness. Technical knowledge helps and always has a plus point. But a person with no passion and full of greed will fail even with the technical or non-technical know how. This is why I love Steem. Community building skills are as important as technical skills. Ultimately STEEM is nothing without people. Apps are nothing without users. Being a community builder such as yourself can become a witness as well @futurethinker. I know you will find a right team to keep your servers up and running 247365. 😎 would happily vote you ;)
I will always choose a great leader over a great coder/technician.
I agree it might be even better for witnesses to be companies like what we see with EOS, and thanks man. :)
agree with you bud, as much as a community witness is important, they have to be balanced with technical knowledge. Or possibly it be a team that has both elements, which is of course the case with a few of them.
So people without the technical know how also go for witnesses? That is weird and dangerous. Thank God it wasn't something worse.
Generally the community witnesses have technical support to keep the witness running so one doesn't need technical skills to be a witness, they need a team that contains some technical skills.
For example jerrybanfield was in the top 20 witnesses for a while.
So he didn't have the technical nitty-gritty? I saw that his witness account has been deactivated long before now
he had help to set up a witness, but in the end he didn't stay a witness for long.
Yeap, they are just marketers, and the opportunists like we can see right now. We don't just have 20 witnesses, we have a whole list of witnesses, if/when the top ones disables their nodes, next 20 will be keep working. So please just don't get fooled by marketers whos trying to turn this chaos into an opportunity..
And afaik, disabling nodes is not just oh I'm bored I'm shutting this thing down. They needed to revert the latest changes (HF20).
https://steemit.com/witness/@holger80/steem-recovered-from-the-hf20-fork-thanks-to-abit-and-its-emergency-patches an example.
It can be clearly seen who deserves a vote, who's actually solving problems.
And I couldn't find the source article but there was a consensus to revert the hardfork 20, so it took that long.
I'm not a witness nor a programmer. I just read and this is what I get so far.
Very good call and an eye opener to a lot of us. I am totally with you on this but then, how can one identify a reliable and responsible witness when they are canvassing for votes?
They do witness updates. And it's to us to do the research. Or you can assign someone who you trust being able to make better educated choices, to vote for you (a proxy).
That's quite true. Thanks for the tips
Considering how things are with the block chain is to be more careful when voting and as you mention, who we do! I think it was a good decision
Hey @gvand! I hope people will put more thought on voting for their witnesses yes!
thx for the infos ...
@steempress was disabled also! Did you see that FT?
I still see it on the list?
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