by @cryptoctopus and @clains
Last week we had the second edition of this series. As stated, the goal is to inform the community on what the people who are the backbone of Steemit are doing, to glorify the good actors and to expose the not so good.
What are Witnesses?
Last time there was some confusion regarding what witnesses are. For those who do not know, here is a short explanation. For those who already know, jump ahead to the update.
Steem currently has 19 witnesses that validate the transactions of the network (you can see them here) and they get compensated for every block of transaction they validate. It's a very important job and it is literally the backbone of the steem blockchain (the technology that powers Steemit.com).
Witnesses have to run and maintain steem servers, update them, and provide reliable price feeds for the Steem Dollars. Witnesses are voted into position and can also get paid to provide services that benefit the steem platform, such as code review, documentation, developing new services, or helping out in the community.
A witness node in the top 19 get paid a fixed amount of about 1 blocks a minute or 1371.42 blocks/day assuming no misses. Payments are ~1430 steem per day (paid in VEST aka SP). At $2 per steem that's about $2860 per day each. However, when it comes to salary the following was brought forth in the comment in the first edition and it's important for everyone to take this into consideration:
The payout of Witness is more akin to stock options than a salary or fee for service, because it is tied to the future value of Steem and can't be cashed out (more than 1% per week). This is a good thing because it means the interests of witnesses are aligned with the interests of Steem in terms of long term value (and increasingly so as witnesses are more vested). However, it does mean that you can't reasonably say to witnesses, "You are being paid all this money, so you better go and spend it every week" because no one is receiving that in actual, spendable, payments. Expecting strong qualifications, competence, engagement, attention and effective representation are entirely reasonable expectations however. There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty as to how much they will truly profit in $USD.
Witness Update
@roadscape
- I am upgrading the server to fix node crashing issues.
- I added max block size column to witness page.
- I wrote a reputation debugging report https://steemd.com/rep
- I did performance optimizations for account pages.
@pharesim
https://steemit.com/steem/@pharesim/bounty-for-completion-of-native-javascript-steem-signer
@riverhead
I am still hammering out issues with the chat server. Guess the update there is we've ramped up server horsepower to address lag and are reaching out to Rocketchat Devs to discuss client side performance issues and I've also started to assemble a team of admins and moderators.
Also: https://steemit.com/steemit/@kennyrowe/steemit-meetup-in-seattle-with-riverhead-james-reidy But that's in a couple weeks - mostly just prep work now.
@xeldal
No updates, just continuing to do the same things I reported on last time.
@bhuz
I should start divesting on Monday, the week after I will start distributing some Rewards to contributors.
@svk
While I started contributing to the steemit.com repo before it went open-source, I was still on vacation (in a sailboat) during that time so my contributions were limited. Now that I'm back home I've started really diving into the code and fixing and changing stuff. I've been trying to focus on some of the little things that the dev team haven't had time to focus on yet, but there are several things you may have noticed that were implemented by me over the last few weeks. Among these are the curation and author rewards pages on your profile page, the hidden "low-quality" votes (that James expanded on using the reputation system), and in the next update you'll see a revamped Profile page that includes some ideas from @etherdesign's awesome design post on steemit.com. The curation rewards will also include links to the user that made the post you got a reward for.
For now the profile page only has a fixed background, but in the near future I will add the ability to set a background picture similar to Facebook's banner; and maybe a short description you can include to let people know what your blog is about or what you're interested in.
@arhag
This past week, I continued working on the dead man switch / will design. I have also been going through the recently open sourced steemit.com code and getting familiar with it.
@wackou
Unfortunately, not much [to update on]... It was my last week at work, had to finish a lot of stuff and then was travelling for holidays 😃 there were a few emergencies for muse and bts, but that's not strictly steem related. Especially given that it's a bug in graphene that was fixed in steem but not backported yet, so it came back to bite us really hard (fortunately @abit was here and we managed to "fix" bts with the help of a couple of other witnesses).
@complexring
I've been working with non-english speakers on posts of stories, trying to gather more support for authors / fiction writers, and have started reviewing the latest code for both steem and steemit, not to mention working closely with my developer on steemgrants, steemscholarships, and steemwriters. I've also been in contact with some community members who have some ideas that we aren't quite ready to share
@blocktrades
- While continuing to analyze performance of the Steem network code, we made a small optimization to peer-to-peer operation. We found a case where a node could request a block after it had already received it from a peer due to a race condition. We're also investigating the possibility of improving the forking logic for Steem.
- Completed changes to BitShares wallet GUI to support Steem Dollars and to allow sending of memos when withdrawing Steem and Steem Dolllars. Among other things, this allows users to directly withdraw OPEN.STEEM to other exchanges without having to first send to their Steem wallet.
- Re-arranged containers and VMs for BlockTrades and OpenLedger to spread out the computational load so as to reduce the chance for failures when sending funds.
- Continued to assist new users learning how to work with cryptocurrencies and the Steem wallet.
@silversteem
Aggregating content providers for the platform that will enrich and diversify what we see today and maintaining/upgrading my servers to support my witness. I have another project that still requires some vetting to ensure it is a suitable direction for the platform. Hoping to be able to discuss more about this soon.
@abit
In this week most of my time is spent on communications in Chinese community. Some time on fighting spam. A little time on code view.
I will be travelling in next 3 weeks, so probably less activities.
@datasecuritynode
I just got back from the lawyers office. Corporation should be ready in a few weeks pending no hangups in processing... SBD cards one step closer.
@joseph
I will have to repost my suggestion to send Steemit representatives to the CM2106, and see if we can get enough support to fund that. If not I will adjust my plans accordingly.
@clayop
From last week:
*Spreading words to Korean community in a public chatroom (with over 150 people)
*Updated and running Noteefi (Telegram notification bot)
*Planning to introduce Steemit to snulife (a community of Seoul National University, which is the best university in Korea and accessible only students and alumni)
*Preparing Steem development contest
This week:
Maintaining a high quality witness server and seed node
Running Noteefi
Initialized a discussion about developing alternative GUI for Korean community: Link
Helped Korean whitepaper translation: Link
Recruiting writers with qualities: Link
@lafona
In addition to the usual updates and upgrades to witness and seed nodes. I have discussed with @steemdrive possible ways to help out with the billboards initiative. As part of the initiative I will be working on a billboard campaign here in Connecticut. In addition we will be looking into ways which witness funding could be used to benefit the project. Outside of these activities, I am an active curator and I try to target undervoted and topically diverse posts. In the past few days I was voted into the list of active witnesses and as such I will continue looking for more ways in which my skills and resources can be used to benefit our community.
@bitcube
Released Windows Wallet and Miner for v0.12.2
Major revamp on Sharebits to first make it work (Goal is to enhance it to support Steem)
Fixed Sharebits's Invalid Objects and Invalid Assets bugs
I have also updated the witness excel sheet.
@smooth
I've hired a curator team. I have 10 people paid to look for the best hidden gems and other quality posts to help develop the site content. if you have any questions about how that works I'd be happy to answer. It is something new I came up with myself and have been running for over a week now, with great results
Follow-up interview with @smooth
I was curious to understand how Smooth pays curators to find hidden gems:
How do you determine what are hidden gems?
High quality posts that are not already in Trending. They can be before payout or after payout (after payout I get no curation reward but I still upvote to support quality content on the platform)
Do the curators have any guidelines?
Yes there are guidelines but they aren't public
How much are curators getting paid?
Pay is not public but is enough that I have an increasingly long waiting list for positions. All are being paid the same.
How can other whales help out?
I'd prefer that other whales do their own thing. One of the problems we've had is too much group voting. There is still plenty of content to be found. Even with 10 curators each sending me links I getting few duplicates.
Are there any open positions?
There are no open positions, all 10 slots are currently filled or in the process of being filled, but there is a waiting list.
Interesting! We'll see how that works out. You can contact @smooth at steemit.chat to get on the waiting list.
Missing Updates:
It doesn't mean that they aren't doing anything but somehow they haven't felt it was important to give an update to the community.
Witness Proposals
@aizensou
Read his witness proposal here: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@aizensou/witness-application-aizensou
@glitterpig
Read his witness proposal here: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@glitterpig/witness-glitterpig-because-everything-is-better-with-a-bit-of-bling
@gtg
Read his witness proposal here: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@gtg/witness-gtg
Comments
Those responses were gathered by @clains manually and very few actually made a public update on their blog. Updates to the witness document has been slow, and only manual updates has worked to keep everyone accountable. For the next update we ask everyone to submit their updates publicly to their steemit blog.
Nevertheless, if you read through the update you can see that many of them are doing great work, particularly back-end work. Those changes may not be apparent for most people but they are fundamental to the long term viability of the platform. We have also seen quite a few witnesses focus on curation recently, which hopefully will help promote great content on the platform.
Vote with your conscience
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Does some of the update above inspire confidence and competence to you? Please vote for them. Since it's still only the second real update, I would ask you not to be too harsh. We will increase the pressure for detailed updates as time goes on. We will demand competence and RESULTS from our witness to ensure the best long term success of this platform.
Thanks for doing this series, guys. I know it can be controversial and rub some people the wrong way, but it's a service to the community for you to get and organize this information + inform us what our representatives are doing. (Actually, I think of them more as trustees than representatives.)
I have tried to become better educated about the witnesses and yet my understanding is still very limited.
Some witnesses are working on development that is essential or quite helpful to the platform. Others are using their income to improve Steemit in other ways or to promote it. It is nice to have frequent updates like this, though I certainly think that some witnesses are working on longer term initiatives (or even secretive projects) that may not show measurable public progress in a short period of time.
Please keep an eye on their work over time rather than just deciding to support someone based on one week's report. And make sure you vote on witnesses!
yep...just do what you are good at.... And you are DAMN good at what you do best - writing!
My 0.02 steem
js aka tk
Thanks for the compliment. But I am not a witness, merely an average Steemit user. However, I got in early enough that I have a good chunk of SP and people who follow my writing, so that brings up another point: perhaps not just witnesses, but also whales, have an obligation to help build Steemit. Since whales are not receiving "public" income from the system (as witnesses do), there is no expectation of them giving back, but I still think if whales want to see the system grow and work effectively they/we should help make that happen. What I like to do is help newbies and help other writers, plus a little promotion.
That is another awesome post! I love this series. You have my upvote. The amount of work you guys put into these post is very incredible. Keep on the good work!
Wow Smooth has hired a whole team of curators, that in itself is epic and super cool to see, not to mention now more people who do quality work will get noticed. For the people who are worried about inequality all that I've seen so far is growing distribution of wealth and a team of developers and whales that are actually doing their best to help the community not their own personal gain. Everything that I've witnessed so far merely increases the support I personally give to steemit. Great update as always.
@clains
Damn it you!
Making me log back just to vote for this awesome post.
You have any idea how long it takes just typing my new password! Lol
Truly great job my freind!
+5%
thanks :D
Brilliant stuff man :) I've started mining recently, so im helping steem out a little bit as well :P
Thanks for the breakdown on witnesses, i have been trying to wrap my head around that. Great post.
Thank you very much for the info. This is invisble part of Steem, but they do great job. But who votes for witnesses?
You vote. We all vote for witnesses.
Upper right of your home page is a menu (next to your blank pic). Click it, and click witnesses. Vote my friend!
You can also go directly to this link to vote for witnesses: https://steemit.com/~witnesses . You can vote for as many witnesses that you'd like to. We'd need to get confirmation on this but I don't think it counts as a normal vote, in my Steemd it labels it as 'applecrisp approve witness ____ '.
Actually there is a limit of 30 witnesses maximum you can vote for and yes it is completely separate from voting on content (does not use up voting power).
@kushed posted this update earlier in the week about one our initiatives (getting Steem suport integrated into a mobile payments app).
! that's awesome. will include it next time :)
For me clains always meant 'good/great'... in dutch or something :)
I was going to write an article about "Curation through automation (bots) or delegation (helpers)?" where I would propose something like what Smooth does - but I guess there is no need for that right now. Good stuff.
I appreciate witness's alot more now that i see what you guys are doing. Stay bad ass.
thanks for the post with the updates @clains 8]
@cryptoctopus and @clains This was the first chance I've had to actually check out your report on Witnesses and it really helps give insight into what goes on behind the scenes.
Without reports like this, voting would almost be done on blind faith because a lot of people don't have enough hours in the day to keep running to github and checking out who did what. Not to mention a lot of the work people are putting it goes far beyond coding and would go unnoticed if it wasn't reported back to us some how.
Thanks for keeping us in the loop! You guys rock!
I wonder if the Rocketchat Devs are on slack ...
if I'm mining steem. By doing this, can I became a witness?
Witnesses do not need to mine. If you are technical you can read this guide: https://steemit.com/steemhelp/@steemed/become-a-steem-witness-essentials
i like the report.
ths for sharing info )
"@wackou
there were a few emergencies for muse and bts, but that's not strictly steem related. Especially given that it's a bug in graphene that was fixed in steem but not backported yet, so it came back to bite us really hard."
Was this why freedom.ledger was down last night? I was trying to access my peerplays. :)
Thanks for the witness report, good to be up to date on what others are updating :)
Awesome work, hope to see this continue. Reminds me of the good old days when the Bitshares newsletter would hit my inbox...
I'm enjoying these posts. Transparency is so important. Have there been any postings on what the developers might have in store for the social media side? New features they might try out etc.
Thanks for posting this. I think a lot of people who are used to mining conventional cryptos are a bit confused by the whole witness thing with DPOS.
@clains, thanks so much for taking all the time to put together this comprehensive update!
Thanks for posting this. As someone who is relatively new to the site, I didn't know much about what the witness are/do. I just thought the main thing they did was to set the interest rate on SBD. I learned a lot from reading your post, and it was really cool to see what they are up to. Gives me a new burst of confidence in the future of Steem :)
@clains thanks for your detailed update on witnesses, it really helped me to better understand the work of the ones making steemit a reality!
PS: Now I wish @smooth team finds my blog :)
Thks for the report. We appreciate!
How do we become witness exactly ?
At this point you are now a witness, although you will be low on the list and won't get to sign many blocks (depending on your SP it may take hours, days or weeks to sign your first). To move up the list you will need to get others to approve you. The more SP you have approving you, the higher you go on the list and the more blocks you get to sign. The top 19 sign dramatically more than the rest.
Thank you, this answer should be a post by itself i believe. I guess it will be difficult to join the top 19. I'm running a web company and i could put some devs and servers up to the task, but i can't invest much if i don't have any return on investment, at least to pay the expenses. Witnesses are paid in Steem, let's say you don't make it to the top, any idea of how much are we talking here ? Just to run some numbers and calculations to see if i can allocate resources to this. Thanks.
The higher ranked alternates probably sign a few blocks per hour (reward per block is 1 SP) but I haven't looked at the detailed calculations. For the very highest of the alternates (say ranks 20-25), they will sometimes enter and leave the top 19 due to changing votes, top 19 witness downtime, etc. so their rate of earnings is higher; between ranks 15 and 25 there is somewhat of a blend between the earnings of a primary witness and a backup (and especially between, say, 18-22).
It seems like witnesses also do some kind of work for the community, i guess to earn votes on the witnesses list. Some are doing marketing, others are coding.
@najoh Earn votes yes, but also to improve the value of our investment. One of the effects of paying witnesses well and paying in SP (witnesses receive no liquid pay at all) is that all become major stakeholders over time whether they started out as such or not, which aligns incentives to work toward Steem/it being a success.
Nice sharing @clains
👍awesome post, good information @clains
This is really informative. It gives a good view of what is going on behind the scenes and is a great addition to the intro stuff on steem.io. perhaps some of this post and or future witness posts could make it's way too the steem.io page as a recent news section so that people wondering whether it not to join up could see the moves that are being made in different territories etc?
This is why I'm convinced steemit is going to thrive where so many other revenue sharing sites failed, thanks for the report and keep uo the great work witnesses
To be honest, witness system will not work (in terms of contributing to the community). This happens to Bitshares before. See the current market cap of Bitshares comparing to that of its launch time. It will repeat in Steem (I mean the so-called contribution). There are witnesses just keep claiming what they have done. There is no proof, nor check and balance. Another problem is whether their contribution worthy for their payout. I strongly urge the community to turn more witnesses to miner-witnesses. At least the miners spend electricity to secure the network. Twenty something human witnesses can be easily colluded to harm the network.
There is a difference. Although I'm not any kind of an expert on Bitshares, as I understand it, witnesses in Bitshares get to set their own pay and this has led to a race to the bottom with most witnesses receiving only 10% of the scheduled pay. This system of variable pay was considered and rejected for Steem to ensure that witnesses have ample resources necessary to support the platform. It is up to the community to make sure that witnesses do a good job and vote out those who don't.
Many thanks to @clains to bring up my witness application here even if we haven't talked. Very appreciate!
That's annoying ! Thanks @clains for this report otherwise i would have never heard about @datasecuritynode working on the SBD Cards !
Anyone knows how to contact him please ?
We started a team almost 2 weeks ago to work on a Steem Debit Card, to gather all information and worked on it after being careful that nobody start the job : a Steem card project. In fact, your witness report says that @datasecuritynode did.
I expected at least a post, or any contact from him so we can work this out together. I decided to have a collaborative and transparent approach, which in my opinion is inherent to our Steem Blockchain philosophy, then i realize we may have lost time because maybe others are working on a more secretive approach on the SBD Cards...
I may understand why he is working secretly on this, but I would really appreciate that @datasecuritynode gets in touch with me so we can know what is the next step and try to contribute to each other
@ekitcho
@clayop I've been posting my steemit article out in Kakao Talk . You can actually register there - It's in Korean but they have an English version. That's like the facebook in South Korea. Try Aewah University, it's exclusively for women - smart women just for back up. I can't wait to see Koreans posting in Steemit they are one of the most creative people in the world.