Hi Bernie. In general, I agree with the assessment that most of the top witnesses should be doing more. If we had all 20 top witnesses doing as much as @jesta, we would probably have a lot different marketcap.
There are a few in your list that I think are actually adding more value than what you have here, but I will leave it up to those individuals to defend themselves if they think it is necessary. (I do agree with more of your comments than I disagree with though..)
For myself, I do feel like I do a lot for the platform (I do run a full node, I am the moderator of the help channel of steem chat, I submit pull requests to condenser, faucet, and devportal repositories, etc.), but even with all of that, I never feel like I am doing enough.
Witnesses get paid a lot, but it is not a “stable/dependable” source of income. As a top witness, I could be voted out at any time, and there are factors that influence the STEEM price that are out of my control. Because of the “instability”, even though I am a top witness, I still hold a “real” job to be able to support my family. This is really unfortunate because after my full time job and a small amount of time to spend with my family each week, I only have a limited amount of time left in the week to spend on Steem. I really do try to do as much as I possibly can in the time I have, but IMO it still never seems like enough.
I know you will probably say that my “personal” life is really my problem to figure out, and for the amount of money involved I should find a way to “make it work” - which I do agree with. I had actually never even really considered that becoming a top witness was even a possibility when I started my campaign, but now that I am actually here (which I consider a huge honor), getting to a point where I can actually do this full time (without putting my family at severe risk) so that I can contribute more is a high priority of mine. I hope to get to that point very soon.
Having witnesses contribute to the blockchain is probably going to be one of the more difficult things to achieve. I agree that having more people (other than Steemit) making changes is something we really need to accomplish. The amount of people qualified to do that though (without breaking things) is probably quite small. Even for myself - I have a software development background, so I think it is something that I am technically capable of, but it would still be a significant challenge for me to actually develop something complicated by myself. Also, right now testing changes is a really big hurdle. Even if I were to develop a change to make a hardfork, I honestly don’t know how I would go about setting up an environment to be able to make sure it works before deploying it to the live network - which is 100% necessary in order for the change to be ‘safe’. I could submit a PR and rely on Steemit to test before merging, but for obvious reasons - this seems to be missing the whole point. I’ve talked to Vandeberg/Steemit about this, and they are working on putting together a test net. Once this is done, it will at least lower the barrier to entry for capable developers to work on changes. It would be great if 2018 could be the year we have our first community hardfork.
The real solution to the problem of underperforming witnesses though (IMO) is competition. When I started there were quite a few in the top 19 that I was pretty convinced were doing absolutely nothing. Since that time, people like @jesta, @netuoso, @followbtcnews, @aggroed, and myself have taken their place. You may still say that many of the ones that are still there (and even the new ones that have taken their places) are still doing very little compared to what they should be - but in my view that is just opportunity for someone who can contribute more to come along and push them out. I really would love to see more people come along and shake things up to create more competition for the top spots. It is definitely not easy to make it into a top position, and requires more than just “working hard”, but if someone comes along and starts adding significantly more value than the ones that are currently there - the stakeholders do seem to notice.
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.
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.
Part of the purpose of my recent posts about expanding the witness voting page to go beyond 50 witnesses, is to do exactly what you are saying is needed here - to give other witnesses a fair chance to be found, voted for and to shine. I'm a bit confused as to why you removed your witness vote for me immediately after I publicly addressed this, since my actions appear (to me) to be in alignment with your stated objective. Maybe there is another reason, I don't know.
Hello @ura-soul, and nice to Steem you! :-) Thanks for your ongoing efforts around democratizing the Witnesses ecosystem, it's much needed!!
Regarding this topic, would there be a way to integrate in steemit.com the platform @drakos built some time ago? (this one: https://steemian.info/witnesses), which is to date the most complete Witnesses vote management tool and overall dashboard.
It's a great tool that I use extensively, and I only control 8 MV of proxy votes.
I find it hard to believe that any stakeholder with enough SP to move the needle is not going to be familiar with third party tools.
Aloha! Thanks! Yes, I posted a proposal for a new design for the witness voting page already, but did not receive any kind of feedback from the Steemit Inc. team - as with most of my other proposals.
I initially voted for you because I saw that out of the up and coming witnesses, you had a lot of potential to do great things.
I don’t really want to argue about the specifics of that particular change - but in my view it is not really the right approach to the problem. If you haven’t made a big enough “splash” for the larger stakeholders to notice you yet, then you probably need to keep working on your campaign. If you do make a big enough splash, then the stakeholders know how to vote for someone outside the top 50. It really isn’t as big of a deal as people make it, and I am speaking as someone who spent many months below the top 50 campaigning to make my way up.
I removed my vote because in my view you are not choosing to spend your time on things that are improving the platform for the stakeholders/users. You seem to be too focused on the things that specifically benefit witnesses, and things that are making it difficult for you move up.
Thanks for explaining. What I am actually focusing on is building Steem Ocean, which is an app that mostly only exists to deliver features that I think should be in Steemit.com but aren't. I have a long list of features to be added in to it that have been collated over a lot of work of talking to users and gaining feedback about what they want and need. Most of my research has sadly had to focus into understanding the black box system of Steemit Inc's feature delivery protocols, rather than on actually delivering features, since I get almost no feedback or answers to questions that are attempting to help the platform. I always get great support from the community for my ideas and they always say that we really need the features and changes I suggest. However the ONLY response I have had from anyone involved with the code is @ned saying that the idea to have witness vote decay was a good one and sneak just being sneak.
Along with having to deal with their tech manager's apparent mis-alignment away from the ideals that founded Steem, I have done what I can to find the time to deliver what the communty wants/needs - which has taken quite a lot of my spare time. I am also busy working with a client and considering SMTs for my own social network. Like you I am time limited here.
I think it's unfair to conclude that I am too focused on witnesses, since I actually only ever mention them in the context of bringing balance that is itself intended to maybe help average users get the features they need and maybe a fairer deal and better experience. I am actually posting as a user first and witness second. If you examine my utopian posts, for example, you will see that witness related ones are a minority.
I did not read your comment until the end.
One of the problems here is creation of "apps" instead of fixing and improving steemit itself.
Granted, creating an "app" is easier and more beneficial, but it does not improve the user experience of the majority, and it usually costs to use and dangerous.
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you are very good at using the bidbot app created by another witness that makes apps... to complain about a witness only creating apps...
I do agree condenser is open source and witnesses can mod it to add what is missing and run it in hopes there is adoption and his changes might find its way into the official thing or the witness can choose to run infrastructure for it.
maybe not everyone is willing to do it for a particular reason ?
When I wrote "apps" I meant interfaces to STEEM which demand active key or posting key from their users.
I did not mean automatized services which at most charge per each use, in a transparent and aware manner like bidbots do.
The reason IMO for steemit/condenser being dumped in favor of "apps" is the corruption in the witnesses election process and the deep stupidity of most people.
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This is why, you have my witness vote and the other man does not.
Me too
Thankyou! Though maybe if you changed your name to 'supersmartwiseguy' the PR value might be higher here. hehe ;)
Hahaha, in all honesty, the name "delusionalmadman" inspires a LOT more confidence in the concurrent era than does the name 'smartwiseguy', lol. :-)
I lol'd
hahaha
You have my vote! You're quite active in posting. That's a good thing. You're also clearly a libertarian; the more the merrier!
I'd like to know more about this steem ocean. It sounds really cool!
Exactly, @timcliff. That's what I tried to tell @ura-soul as well - but I wasn't taken serious due to my blessing with freedom's vote.
No, you are judging me here - I did not say in any way that I did not take you seriously because of freedom's vote. I said very specifically and only that exposure comes as a result of being in the top 50 due to the vote page layout. The data points to corroborate that and testimony from some in the top 50 corroborates that. Clearly it is also important to receive votes from large stake holders and clearly not everyone is going to attract their attention, but the least we can do is give all witnesses an equal shot.
"I removed my vote because in my view you are not choosing to spend your time on things that are improving the platform for the stakeholders/users. You seem to be too focused on the things that specifically benefit witnesses, and things that are making it difficult for you move up." - @timcliff
^ Today I learned ^
But, focusing on things that prevent witnesses from moving up, that are VALID and documentable in the data is EXACTLY what opens the platform up and removes potential "obstruction of justice" so to speak for ALL users.
I'd argue for @ura-soul on the topics he has chosen to take on, as I also take them on, WHILE he still builds SteemOcean and I built a voice for ALL people, ALL communities and ALL inclusive on the @SteemStarNetwork (since the last station fell into the hands of a closet-socialist exclusive elitist who stole the people's voice) and a worldwide steem exclusive, block chain transparent humanitarian aid organization in the form of the @YouAreHOPE Foundation that the meta community at large loves to support. AND we choose to also seek and expose truths and theories about potential truths to the people for the goal of platform operational "righteousness" at the same time, man. And that includes witness gaming, and vote collusion and all sorts of nasty big money at stake B.S.
So there's that.
But now I know why I have never gotten your vote, despite the amount of respect and even, dare I say, admiration, which I have always shown you.
I just don't have it in me to pretend in the face of glaring issues and blow bubbles and rainbows I guess.
Correct
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Your credibility fell so many notches with me in this one word answer. Turns out you are just another "yes" man who is willing to "overlook" rampant corruption because to do otherwise and exhibit GENUINE conviction would sort of ruin your position among a gang that doesn't have much interest in real decentralization or equality, since you and them already got yours, it would be dangerous to be honest now...
I can understand why you would be upset with my one word answer. I don’t think you understood what I was going for, but how could you since I only gave one word :)
I have gotten to know you somewhat well since I initially met you, and I like you as a person. I think you have good morals and want to use your life to help other people. I respect that.
I was mainly responding to your comment about me not voting for you as a witness. As you stated in your comment, you were correct that my not voting for you is based on the priorities that you are focusing on. I disagree with them, but I also respect your right to focus on whatever priorities you want. I also already know that neither of us is going to convince the other of our point of view on this matter - so there is not much of a point of “arguing”. My one word response was basically an expression of that.
I’m not really sure what corruption you think I should be fighting, but in general “fighting corruption” is not really one of the things that I see as an important role of my witness duties - so if you see that as being dishonest - then this may be another area where we agree to disagree.
As a witness I feel that it is more important for me to focus on what parts of the protocol are allowing corruption to take place, and whether I should be advocating for or against any particular changes based on that. If there are any points to discuss in this area - I’m happy to share my views.
Tim you have my proxy but I'm going to have to remove it. You'll still have my vote, and learning who I want to vote for will be a benfit though time consuming.
The reason I speak up is to address your point about competition and Bernie's point about witnesses that engage on the Steemit blockchain.
We have a recent new witness: @qurator
IMO it's tough to find a witness that contributes or cares more about Steemit than @scrooger (including his entire team).
My 2 cents, and I hope more people consider them for a top spot.
Thanks for the shout out man! I really try!
Even in this dark times I am buying steem to keep Qurator's leases going. The price will recover and then all will be supporting itself again. The idea for the witness was to show we are serious and we want to help make a change. Promote quality posting and control it, monitor it. Sad to say but to do what we need people and funds to pay them. That is what the witness is for, generate funds so we can pay people to help make a difference!
Viva la Steemit!
No problem @scrooger. You deserve it and it shows. There are two sides (at least) that I consider before giving my support.
It's not all about the service, but the people who run it. I've never seen anyone on your team treat people with anything but the utmost respect and consideration.
Appreciate it man, means a lot. Will be sharing this comment in our meeting room!
Sounds good. Thanks for letting me know. I’m happy to hear that you are taking witness voting seriously, and voting for the ones you think will do the best job.
Hey @timcliff , I read your responses to this thread and I am now voting for you as witness.
Cool, thanks :)
Hello @timcliff , I know that the post im referencing to is an eternity ago in this day an age of fast paced , here today gone tommorrow social media /news cycle , but a year ago you created some content about SteemConnect . The links are all current and bring me to an identical page to your example you have shown in the post . It says Create a Username , I did that part ,then store , write down , and back up the generated password provided for the new account . I then provided the steem in the designated section to pay the asking fee to create the account useing SteemConnect . I then fill out the next section providing my Username an Active Key and in the box with my usermame has a green check same with my PW , when I click continue it says the the username or account name is invalid and it brings me back to the first page .... I tryed different Usernames , same thing .
I know you are very busy , judgeing by your following and the quality of the content your posting I can see why !
If you can find time to give me some guidence on the subject , or even just pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated !
You got my follow/resteem/upvote , I am looking forword to more great content . Thank you for your time . STEEEEMONNNNNNN
Can you send me the username you are trying to use, a screen shot of the page with all the values filled out, and a screen shot or text copy of the error message it gives?
Had something to add.
@timcliff funded the creation of @steemflagrewards and has been a consistent supporter.
That 6 Steem has led to much more worth of rewards being returned to the reward pool from scammers and abusers via our crowdfunded abuse fighting system and discord flag mention comment reward mechanism.
It would be awesome if other large stakeholders would be willing to help this flag incentivization iniative so we can further quell and deincentivize abuse.
Also, @berniesanders, thank you for what you do. I can think of anyone that does as much as you do to counter abuse and the manipulative asshats that live on Trending.
Lastly, thank you for your support of @flagawhale in supporting the quest against one of the foremost reward pool manipulator.
Thanks for doing all that you are doing..