recently I saw the Call to Action to vote on Leofinance as a hive witness. I'm years on hive and st33m and I only know 19 of the first 50 witnesses...
So let's dig in
What is a witness?
Hive is quite complex and the whole blockchain world is quite new for everybody. What a Witness does in simple terms is to produce (mine) new bits of information called blocks with the new data produced by the users of the chain. So basically they keep the chain up to date.
We need many witnesses that all produce or check the same chain so no single person or group can edit the chain for their own benefit. The more witnesses the more it's decentralized.
Becoming a witness
You can become a witness by renting a VPS server for 50$ a month orso but the technical details are not in my scope. Being a witness and being one that matters is the main difference.
You need people that follow you and are willing to vote for your account. They put trust in you. For that to happen you need to build authority and promote yourself.
That brings me to who are they currently?
Who are the current ?
I personally know only 19 of the 50 by name. I got 30 votes so I voted on people I don't know not the best situation. Also votes are not equal if you got a big account your vote is much heavier. So it's more an Aristocracy than a Democracy.
If that's a good or bad thing is up to you.
So let's dig in the first once I don't know:
- @gtg the number 2 but reading his posts, his reputation is high, looks like a dev guy. I vote for him because he is high and seems fine...
- @ausbitbank seems like another developer that I don't know, also high reputation, runs a higher version of hive blockchain. No clue why.
- @pharesim, number 7 on the list, not voted for him no clue why just as I got no clue why I voted for number 2 and 5.
So who are those guys, what are their thoughts, what do they want, maybe all those accounts are the same people, do they deserve my vote?
Isn't it time witnesses say what they would like to accomplish like a politician. False promises are better than having no clue right?
Hive chain is very open but the needed information for people out of the inner circle is quite limited for my feeling.
So let me know your thoughts. Who do you vote for?
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Hello there, I'm Gandalf, I'm around for quite a bit, trying to do my best for the platform. Infrastructure and security are my things, blogging not so much, but I guess reading my posts might give you some clue who I am. I was on every
SteemHiveFest since 2016 where you could meet me in person. I used to help and runsteem.chatwhich before discord era was the used off-chain form of instant communication for users (80k+ active users back in the days). Now it's OpenHive.Chat run by @followbtcnews (& @crimsonclad) where I keep the lights on, and we still have some good ideas for improvements and development using Hive integration. I help various people to deal with Hive (that includes begginers level on chat's #help channel, but mainly hardcore stuff for devs & exchanges.Thank you for bringing up this topic, our history shows that it's very important to know who we are voting for.
Hi Gandalf,
Thanks for the reply. I'm going to look into this and maybe become a proxy for people to vote on witnesses on their behalf.
Time consuming to figure who does what.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
In my opinion it's better to not cast all your votes than voting for people you don't know anything about.
It requires some time and work to collect information, and sometimes there just isn't enough published to get a good picture. But it's essential to do so. You don't lose anything by not casting a vote, but you may hurt witnesses working on getting higher on the list by just piling up on the top.
I personally only vote for witnesses outside the top 20 to contribute to decentralization as much as possible. Minimum requirement is an active node and some information about themselves on their blog. Being active in a project helps, but with the few hive they earn on the bottom we can be thankful for everyone who maintains a witness node.
If you want to know more about me than my witness information provided, just scroll all the way down my blog, there are very few posts that are not connected to my work on hive throughout the years.
I personally only vote 7 of the top 20 witnesses, Most of the people I vote for are either people I've met IRL or have talk to on more than one occasion online and generally know enough about, or are makers of a project that I wish to support.
It's really almost too easy to become a witness these days.. Just purchase a privix vps and load up the hive-in-a-box image and bam you have one running.
Doesn't decentralize the chain much at all since all the node are running with the same company (don't get me wrong privix is a great company just we don't want all our nodes running in one place company wise)
(shameless plug warning)
Like for instance my witness node runs on my home computer where I have full control over every aspect of it. (its a beast of a computer)
Communities I run: Gridcoin (GRC)(PeakD) / Gridcoin (GRC) (hive.blog)| Fish Keepers (PeakD) / Fish Keepers (hive.blog)
Check out my gaming stream on VIMM.TV | Vote for me as a witness!
good point is it possible to check with witnesses run where?
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Not that I know of. Sometimes witnesses put where they are hosted in their witness announcement post which is sometimes linked on the witness page if they set that up.
Communities I run: Gridcoin (GRC)(PeakD) / Gridcoin (GRC) (hive.blog)| Fish Keepers (PeakD) / Fish Keepers (hive.blog)
Check out my gaming stream on VIMM.TV | Vote for me as a witness!
Hi, to be fair the unvote of our witness is what brought me to this post, although I'm constantly on Hive curating, voting what others curate (with ocd&ocdb) and some times posting when I have the time and voting power is exhausted it's not easy to keep track on everything. 5 years on the chain in a week or so and still committing all of my time around hive in various ways. I agree with you that witnesses should be more proactive and at least post about their activities, plans and ideas but to be honest with you we're so busy curating users, assisting community growth by voting what their leaders curate and delegating to them and currently working on an onboarding program where the abuse of it will be minimal but the retention rate of new content creators and the way the program can scale hopefully maximal.
I'll try my best to push out a post this week on everything we're covering and what our plans are next with @ocd and @poshtoken among other things. Maybe you can throw me a follow to check up on that when its posted and hopefully you'll reconsider our witness vote, thanks. :)
You earned your spot back :) on the list :)
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Btw, I noticed you're using dlease and that a lot of your leasers are people from the project hope community who have been abusing the platform in many ways. Instead of dlease I think you could do better delegating to curation projects directly who'll use the stake with more rules and health of the distribution in mind such as curangel.com or (my own) https://thegoodwhales.io/delegators.html by delegating to @ocdb for daily liquid returns. There's a fee involved in these as well, ocdb has one of the lowest but considering dlease also takes 10% I think it pretty much evens out and your investment might see better returns in the long run if your stake is being used well.
the APR is already including the fee on dlease, but you make a solid point. Someone else pointed me already on the project hope issue and i will let those leases run out or cancell.
Ah okay, have never used it!
It's pretty wild right? The call to action was also to bring awareness that this is in fact part of the block chain and how it all operates.
I firmly believe that each witness should have some type of monthly update that overviews what they have done, plan on doing etc. Some of these guys/gals could very well be doing good hard work on the back end but I nor you know about it unless they post about it.
More attention and some structure needs to be in place for the Witnesses section I feel. By knowing what people are working on etc. it builds more confidence in the platform as well creates hype as people see development and changes happening no matter how big or small they might be.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
exactly, we need to make a page for this. Happy to do some work in this.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Hi, well I'm not quite a top 50 witness yet (#62) but I thought I'd introduce myself.
I am a lawyer and a geek (an unusual combination) by both education and practice.
I've brought these skills together to run a class action lawsuit against Facebook & Google for banning the ads of the cryptocurrency industry back in early 2018 (leading to the last big crash and crypto winter).
I'm also a pretty active blogger and commenter on chain and pioneered running a witness on my own Windows PC as a way to aid decentralisation. Although I'm using a Linux PC as well as a second witness (which is more reliable).
I'm sometimes know as Hive's lawyer as I'm the only active lawyer on chain that I know of and have been involved in helping out with various legal issues (eg HF23 Sun's Steal).
I'm also active in Splinterlands and Exode.
You can vote for my witness below:
https://hivesigner.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=apshamilton&approve=1
Your coming on my list :)
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Thanks for the witness vote.
Thank you for this introduction.
Congratulations @gogreenbuddy! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Your next target is to reach 21000 upvotes.
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STOPGreat idea for an article. Sorry I didn't see it sooner.
Interesting information, i know is a month old, but damm it shed some light to the whole witness thing for me, to think i found it by tracking what it was dlease, triying to lease some hp for my self to learn what it was and how it worked. Just to see how it works, i saw your name on one of the leases of a nft artist and i follow it here, and damm i was schooled XD
Great info, there is not much info on the witness around on hive, dont really know why. All info is mostly self propagated by the witness themself, so their value reduces to "Do you trust this info?" But this post sure teach some info willout pushing it far, and the witness that comments are great goals. In fact i already voted on some of them from before.
Still i have little more than a month on hive, before that i maded the account but i understood close to nothing so I ended up keeping my head out of it until hive classroom initiative taught me the basics :3
Anyways, love this post <3 gonna reblog it for a week or so <3
Prompted by some spam I decided to take a look at who is voting for this @earn.hive witness account which has a pay-for-vote scheme. This sort of scheme is not a value-add for Hive, it's parasitic. The incentive for voting witnesses should not be monetary, but to vote competent, trustworthy block producers who will reliably keep the network decentralized. Without this, what will your stake be worth? This sort of parasite needs to be nipped in the bud.