I think this is spot on. Competition does more to spur quality work than anything else. There are some witnesses who are doing some pretty cool things, and they are climbing up the ranks, such as:
@ats-witness, who runs a full node all the time, has always only ever done things to contribute to the platform since I've seen him on here. He had a campaign against sock puppets at one time, which was largely successful. He started up a sports and poker league, and has developed a curation system exclusive to authentic users only, he used to do a crypto and steem market analysis, which did really well, and he's regularly (every day) curating good content and sponsoring contests and initiatives, and has done his fare share of flagging and anti-spam contributions.
@reggaemuffin is another great one. He is one of the largest contributor to anti-spam crusades that I am aware of. He regularly sponsors @steemflagrewards and @steemcleaners with delegated power and gifted SBD so they are able to flag down abusers as well as reward those who flag. He runs a full node, he is constantly posting updates in development, information, and other ideas that will make this platform a better place, he is busy interacting with the community, and he appears to have every intention of doing what it takes to be a good witness.
@cervantes has done huge things to engage the Spanish-speaking community all over the globe. He regularly interacts with followers and friends on steemit who take heed to his comments and posts, and he posts educational, informative, and helpful content on a daily basis. He curates well, he comments often for a witness, and he has excellent voting history.
@ura-soul appears to be interested in the platform. I'm not sure what will happen there. I don't know anything about him. But look forward to seeing him make good on some of his promises...
I know there are other great ones, but these are just the ones I know about personally and feel like I can attest to.
@Qurator has just started as a witness and also runs a great community project , educating people how to use content properly instead of copy pasta, and we are still growing with +1000 members
When you say 'full nodes' here, do you mean public RPC nodes with all plugins enabled?
I have no idea. It's just the echo chamber talking.
As far as I know, and this is here say from someone pretty technical who told me "they checked recently", there are less than 3 "FULL" nodes with all plug ins enabled.
@sircork wow... less than 3 full nodes out of.. 200+ witnesses on the entire blockchain? That's crazy... I guess that brings me to the question: Why so many witnesses?? And where/ how was/ is this number determined?
Start by reading the white and blue papers.
Thx
I read both blue and white paper. And while they were both interesting and informative, while also answering my question in part--they did not give any satisfactory explanation, reasoning , or justification for the actual breakdown of the witnesses, per se. For example: how many full-nodes are required to run the platform smoothly? It would seem, given the definition of full-node (i.e; a "miner" which oversees the blocks and "verifies" their addition to the ledger), that having only three witnesses performing this function seems s a bit dicey... There again,
there was little explanation regarding the procedure of the witnesses themselves. Also, if I read correctly, there are 200 "witnesses," yet, only 21 of them are actually mining the blockchain... the remaining 179 are merely waiting their turn, while simultaneously combining all of their "voting power" into the "21st" of the 21 miners as a "time shared" witness slot. There again, I could be mistaken, but that's how it looked to me..
From what I read: Blocks on the steemit blockchain are produced in "rounds." with anew block made every three seconds. Out of 200+ "Witnesses" or, steemit memebers eligible to be a witness, 20 of them are chosen as "block producers," while the remaining ~179 are folded into the 21st spot. From the white paper itself: "The 21 witnesses are shuffled every round." If this is the case, then those 21 witnesses are "shuffled" every three seconds?? That seems pretty wild.. Perhaps I'm missing something.
I really wish there were more transparency regarding the witnesses and their job/ role.
Good to know.
I guess I will have to keep my guess about the identity of your source to myself, but I do take your words.
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@crimsonclad, from what I understand, a "full-node" within the context of a blockchain mining operation, is a participant who, unlike the miners who are merely, blindly chugging along, figuring out the best "hashes" with which to "decode" the messages (i.e., cryptocurrency tokens/ coins), the full-nodes are given the responsibility of actually adding said blocks--after being deciphered by the miners--into the actual, formal blockchain ledger. They are kind of the "gatekeepers," so to speak: deciding here and there, which blocks mined by the miners will become "set-in-stone" and a part of the blockchain forever-more. So they are the real "head honcho," whereas the miners are just blindly working (or, rather, their CPUs are ;)) . The "full-nodes" are there to solve any discrepancies, etc.
That being said, it would seem to me that having only three "people" in this position of full-node--out of how many total users?!?--seems precarious, at best...
I say all of this with the caveat that I am not a "pro" at this stuff-merely learning "along the way" as many others. I am happy to receive any correction or criticism--in fact, I welcome it!! Let us learn this thing together, and grow!!
I understand what the types of seed/witness/rpc node functions are~ the reason I ask is because we do not have enough full RPC nodes (with all plugins enabled) being made available to the public, and if another was to come on the scene I was surprised that many of us missed it, so I was clarifying. The RPC debate is one that has been going on for some time now, as obviously more are better both for decentralization and for stability, but currently, it is more costly than people would like to run something for the benefit of all, versus running a private node to be used only by a single project. This means fewer people take them on and set them up. There are other, private nodes being spun up to back individual projects, certainly, but for devs wanting to work with this chain who can't afford to do that, public resources are important.
So in this case, the 'miners' you are talking about are the witness servers, versus the seed node support, however, I'm talking about RPC nodes. The servers that are witnessing (verifying/generating) blocks are the witnesses, and there are many more than three of those. Rewards are allotted for these witnesses based on each block produced, and ranking is based on stake weighted voting in an election type consensus mechanism, so the term mining isn't really applicable in this case. You have 20 top scheduled producers, and a 21st rotating spot which is taken from all other enabled witnesses based on a schedule that is proportional to DPoS ranking.
Thank you. Okay... so I think I'm starting to (maybe) understand--there are 200+ "Witnesses," though, only 21 of those are, at any given time, "on the clock," so to speak (i.e., "witnessing")..?
And, amongst all these various witnesses (which are also "nodes," if I'm not mistaken?) there are also various types of nodes; namely, "seed nodes," and "RPC nodes," the latter being a particular type of node which is designed to support public functions and operations--as opposed to different "private nodes," which are not designed to interact with the "general" steem chain...?
Is that kinda on the right track??
there are 200+ enabled, active witness servers (thousands and thousands that are disabled and not active.) The block schedule is such that each of the top 20 ranked witnesses produces a block each cycle (which is 63 seconds... a block each 3 seconds,) followed by the 21st. The 21st rotates through all active witnesses outside the top 20, proportional to their ranking. If a witness is disabled, then it doesn't go into the schedule, produce any blocks, or receive rewards for doing so.
Seed nodes don't produce blocks but do store data to support the chain, but the very quick and dirty explanation for the difference between a seed and an RPC node is that not all seeds expose the RPC port for API calls over WebSockets, which is what frontends like Steemit, Busy, and condenser based interfaces use... if you want applications built on the blockchain to be able to take advantage of all technical possibilities, all plug-ins need to be enabled. This is what requires such a skookum server, and what makes them generally quite expensive to run. The more load put on the fewer servers is bad for latency and stability of course, which is why it's important to have more of them. The cost being prohibitive and the fact that they do not generate rewards makes this harder to do for many developers, who then need to rely on public nodes provided by others.
So, as to your last question, the public bit refers to the RPC being available to anyone who would like to use it, whereas a project which is resource intensive or depends on low latency or whatever the case may be may choose to run a private RPC. This simply means it is only used by the developer for the projects they choose, and the connection is not made available to everyone on the chain so the resources are dedicated to particular performance. (For example, Steemd uses a private RPC as it gets MILLIONS of requests daily)
This is awesome. Thank you for taking the time to explain something which I'm sure is probably pretty tedious lol. I appreciate it.
It's not a problem at all; the more people who understand these basics, the stronger the understanding is of our chain in general. It's basically what I'm here for :) I enjoy talking to people who are interested in the inner workings of the systems they use.
Isn't @reggaemuffin the one who runs @minnowbooster? I have been trying to get my 100 SBD back that was stolen from me because I figured out how to buy more votes than other people using skills I taught myself. I was blacklisted and my money was stolen without warning. Whoever runs minnowbooster isn't replying or returning the money I sent. I read the rules and I followed them. I just used the service more than most people since I am home all day. I quickly became one of the highest in terms of transfers to minnowbooster because that helps you buy the votes that you want. Needless to say, I am pissed that someone with so much money is still a thief.
Sorry you had this experience! Wanna chat me up on discord and we can see what happened?
Yes please, I will contact you in the next 48 hours.