Okay so this is one of the most challenging subjects new users have been struggling with grasping. I want to dive in momentarily, but first I'll drop a few explainatory videos and other guides I've used to learn to credit their hard work and give you other sources and different media formats to share on.
Guides
- https://steemit.com/witness-category/@timcliff/witness-voting-guide by @timcliff
- https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitguide/steemitguide-what-is-a-exactly-is-a-steem-witness-and-why-every-user-should-vote by @steemitguide
- https://steemit.com/witness-category/@someguy123/seriously-what-is-a-witness-why-should-i-care-how-do-i-become-one-answer by @someguy123
- https://steemit.com/steemit-guides/@pfunk/a-full-steemit-user-s-guide-to-steem-witnesses by @pfunk
- Lastly check out this questionaire that @cryptofiend wrote up for Steemit witnesses to fill out as a way for them to work with the community on their transparency - https://steemit.com/steemit/@thecryptofiend/witness-questionnaire-a-solution-for-voter-confusion by @thecryptofiend
- If you are looking to become a witness, here is a guide: https://steemit.com/steemhelp/@steemed/become-a-steem-witness-essentials by @steemed
Video Explainations
Simple Overview
Steem witnesses are essentially a vote-based political system that enables certain users to have a major influence on how Steemit will progress in terms of updates on the blockchain (hardforks) the value of Steemit to SBD (price feed), the value given to a new registered user to afford them to get started, they are the main producer of blocks for the blockchain, and have a major impact on community projects and Steemit social platforms. It is a delegated proof of stake (DPOS) system which is explained in the video above.
Some things to be clear:
- technically anyone can be a witness, but you generally need to meet some requirements for people to actual support you (which you'll need)
- witnesses are for the Steem blockchain, not Steemit, but through Steemit we can vote and do everything we need to do related to the process
- you can delegate your vote to a proxy
- you should care because if you are not voting nor having someone proxy vote for you, other people could be voting in malicious representation for Steem
- you have 30 votes which you can change at any given time
Steemd Witnesses
You can view a list of the current top 100 witnesses here: https://steemd.com/witnesses. Some are not actually active but still have their votes thus remain in the top 100. The main people with power are the top 19 and 2 others from the pool of 100. One is a backup witness and one is a miner only witness.
I will not be diving into extremely technical explanations as always, my audience is generally minnows or people trying to learn the basics and get an understanding!
Vote For Witnesses at https://steemit.com/~witnesses
You get 30 votes and you can see how many you have left. You can also see the witness thread for each witness which is like their whitepaper for what their goals are / what they are supporting and or working on.
At the bottom you can see who you have voted for and if you want to change your vote. You can also set a proxy so someone else can vote on your behalf! I intend to one day become a witness, but for now if you don't want to get super involved in all the politics and keeping up with different witnesses then you can always set me as your proxy! I will start adding that to my signature in case people want to do that.
In the future I will share updates on witnesses and who I feel should receive votes etc.
Steem Witnesses Further Explained
Quick picture-less concise explanations below cover the major topics of witnesses. I am resharing the table from https://steemd.com/witnesses so you can refer to it with these explanations
Voting
Everyone gets 30 votes per account to give out and or take back at any time via https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Proxy
Proxying your vote is pretty simple you just go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses navigate to the bottom and type in a username here:
I have started to take an active interest in Steem witnesses treating them as future global decentralized politics. If you don't want to learn or bother to stay up to date with it, but do not want your vote wasted then you can make me your proxy to vote on your behalf!
Registration
In the table you can see the different registration fees given by each witness
STEEM Price Feed
In the table you can see the feed. They update their value for STEEM every day to influence the price and the rate of how it converts STEEM to SBD. This information is displayed with the other major indicators here: https://steemd.com/witnesses
Hardfork Influence
They control what version of STEEM we are on and add policies when they commit to a hardfork in the blockchain. This is crucial as they basically set future "legislation or policies" to be enforced on the STEEM blockchain.
SBD Interest Rate
They have influence over the rate at which you earn SBD in your savings and power.
There is a lot that they do outside of their assigned duties, but it's important to vote and participate in order to do our part to ensure the platform stays quality as part of our responsibility in the free decentralized network that is STEEM.
Leave a comment for what you think about all this and if you're going to vote, if you have already, or if you'll make your proxy. Also given that I'm out here trying to help minnows on a daily let me know if you would consider voting for me as a witness (to start gauging support) I currently work with @DTube and @Steepshot and am looking to expand to help other projects and I think as a witness I could majorly influence helping more platforms build and grow on the Steemit. This is all very ambitious and far into the future. I realize that Steemit and Steem are not the same and most of my content is for Steemit, but I believe that the Steemit witnesses should be more for the people since some are inactive or don't do much on Steemit.
I also have a general question to pose.... as far as I know, every account gets 30 votes, so what stops anyone from making many accounts and voting for themself as a witness?
Every time I post I select 1 random winner from the upvotes, resteems, and comments totaling 3 winners and give them 0.01 SBD each and announce it on the next post! I also send out 0.001 weekly to followers! I use https://snackaholic.github.io/steemfortune/en/ by @snackaholic
The winners from the last post I made here:
Were:
@misinaelizaveta
@mytechtrail
@businesswri
Note that once I’ve posted a new post the contest is over and this could be subject to any amount of time up to but not longer than 7 days
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@DTube is an amazing platform meant as a decentralized solution to YouTube's copyright, censorship and monetization issues. We are building a community around the platform!
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@ScottCBusiness
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Proxy
Proxying your vote is pretty simple you just go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses navigate to the bottom and type in a username here:
I have started to take an active interest in Steem witnesses treating them as future global decentralized politics. If you don't want to learn or bother to stay up to date with it, but do not want your vote wasted then you can make me your proxy to vote on your behalf!
Delegation
📲 If you don’t always use your vote power or all your SP or just want to get upvoted regularly, you can delegate SP to me to receive upvotes on all your content
Use https://steembottracker.com/ to delegate any amount to me!
A nice post in my eyes 😊 Resteemed by @peekbit to say “thank you“ since you are one of my esteemed followers.
Read about my attempt in contributing to the bright side of life.
Some remarks about my resteeming.
Thanks! Cheers
Like your normal votes, Witness votes are based on SP you have. So what really matters is the amount of SP you have.
Thanks I figured that out just recently, appreciate the reinforcement on that :)
You're doing good work here - so much of an effort! I have selected your account to receive my vote from the smartsteem whitelist ✊
Thank you so much! I do my best :)
That's for sure! I sometimes lurk in the discord channel (as bushgrad). I see you interact diligently there too. When I have more time, I will try to learn and eventually lend a hand somehow.
Yeah I do try to! And awesome, glad to have you here!
Great post,Because your article is informative.
thanks I try!
Very informative and interesting. We are still quite new to steemit and learning more every day. Keep up the good work.
I will! Cheers
Thanks for your informative article.
Cheers :)
Thanks for the SBD. Do you know if I can add you as a proxy when I have used some of my votes?
Yeah you can, but it would reset your votes unfortunately to whatever mine are
Thanks, I will probably just follow along with your witness research postings.
Sounds good :) Got to make sure we do our part!
I have already voted for 18, so looking forward to your thoughts on others I could support.
Awesome!
I interested of your bid..but to get 30 votes wheter we have to change our SBD before?
And about your question,I think it's a good idea to stop making many account then voting for ourself as a witness
You automatically start with 30 votes for free
Okay..I will trying to link the website.thanks alot
Cheers
Good jop my frend
thanks so much!
very good post
Thanks!
i hope you can vote well
I appreciate the trust! I will be researching and going over the witnesses this week and making posts about who I will vote for and why
thanks @scottcbusiness, I got new knowledge from this post .
Nice share
Awesome, cheers!
That's a good question lol I don't use all my 30 votes, I know. Maybe just half of that.
I guess, if someone wanted to be sneaky, they would create multiple accounts and vote for themselves, however, someone who want to truly be a witness is someone who want to truly help the community. Someone who want to truly help the community, knows and understand how self voting in such a way would not benefit the blockchain system to which they wish to be contributing. And the honest ones are usually the most transparent witnesses in the community. I guess we just need to trust.
But that is scary, that it is possible currently with the circumstances that one could become a witness via buying steem power and just making accounts technically. The problem is.... you can't downvote. We couldn't even counter it aside from us all making sure everyone votes and makes extra bots for themselves for the politics. I hope that loophole is fixed or addressed? There needs to be a verification system that ensures it is just one HUMAN voting. By these regulations technically an alien could influence our STEEM blockchain :P but even so maybe I just don't understand, but hopefully it's dealt with
Yeah, I agree about there being a way to ensure only one human votes. Not sure if that is in the works or not.
I should hope
I don't even see proxies, like I know I have someone who made me their proxy but I only know cause they told me ?
another one, can low rep accounts still vote?
Yes, but their vote has much less weight. I'm not sure how it works if they vote for a witness, but I presume it's similar. Someone with low enough rep that they drop to below 25, then their comments are hidden, so their voting power means almost nothing.
So is it voting power that is being given or? That's the one thing I'm shaky on, are they receiving a portion of my Steem Power influence or something?
No, it's not like voting for someone's post and your voting power goes down each time you vote. It's a different voting system, but I think if your rep is below 25, it's as though you're not voting for them. Or something like that. Your vote simply means a vote and the witnesses with the most votes are the ones who are active on the platform and allocated a few extra things and such. I'm not sure on all the details but I do know the vote does not affect your voting power the same way. Besides, even if it did, you vote for a witness once and your vote remains permanent unless you change it.
That is what I thought and there are no tools to like check proxies or how many bots are voting for witnesses atm, so considering they start at 25 if you have empty accounts who just act as proxies it seems fairly easy to abuse
What they should do IMO is implement a Rep minimum to be able to vote for witnesses. So noone below Rep lvl 40 or something, can vote for a witness. I think it took until I hit lvl 40 to KNOW and understand a bit what a witness is and does anyway. That would add an extra layer to help weed out proxies at starting rep.
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Нигде без политики не обходится. Думаю я к этому ещё не готов, нужно тщательно разобраться, а на это нужно время. Посмотрим на дальнейшее развитие событий.
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You just planted 0.92 tree(s)!
Thanks to @scottcbusiness
We have planted already 3447.23 trees
out of 1,000,000
Let's save and restore Abongphen Highland Forest
in Cameroonian village Kedjom-Keku!
Plant trees with @treeplanter and get paid for it!
My Steem Power = 18648.76
Thanks a lot!
@martin.mikes coordinator of @kedjom-keku
Do we will get 30 vote to every post or just one post?are there some requirement to get it?
no it's for voting for witnesses separate from posts non money related. It's related to the governance of the STEEM blockchain