I painstakingly copied these from https://steemd.com/witnesses into excel. That is why I stopped at top ten. If anyone knows of a better way to do this then let me know.
The witnesses are a very important part of STEEM. They process all the blocks for STEEM and are generally leaders of the community. All forks and changes to the blockchain must be approved by the witnesses in order to be implemented. If you haven't voted for a witness before then you should visit this link (https://steemit.com/~witnesses) and vote for people you think add value to STEEM and who's ideas you agree with. Everyone has 30 slots for witness voting.
Some observations from this data:
@jesta - only witness in the top 10 who doesn't self vote
@curie - only 1 vote cast and it is a self vote
@good-karma - votes for everyone in top 10 except for @blocktrades
Top 7 minus @curie have some love for @abit, @anyx, @clayop, @furion, @pfunk (witnesses outside top 10)
There is a clique of witness votes.
The fact that almost all of them premined is about as bad.
I found this searching desperately for the thread about sneak's support of a deep state and his contempt for democracy.
It is not your thread, but I already browsed other users' posts whom I considered as the source where I found it.
I tried calculating how much to the top witness votes added together were of the percentage of the Vests cast for the top witnesses but never finished it. All the information is cumbersome to pull out of the blockchain. I believe there is very little chance of changing the top witness positions because of the whale factor and dead votes. Would be great if votes reset after a year of idle activity.
Can you link to the deep state article you are referring to?
I found it later, here it is:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@ura-soul/just-so-we-re-clear-the-tech-manager-of-steemit-is-anti-democracy-and-pro-oligarchy-in-his-own-words
Premining is the reason to why almost every Steem whale did not have to pay market price for his shares.
The only whales whom did not premine that I know about are blocktrades and ranchorelaxo.
The only top 20 witnesses that did not premine that I recall are: ausbitbank, aggroed, timcliff, blocktrades and lukestokes.mhth (5 out of 20) and I may have forgot a name or 2, so it may be over 25%.
And while this number may seem better than expected, the mine free witnesses are only there due to the grace of the preminers, and it affects their behavior in a bad way.
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If you havent used all your votes please vote @yensesa as a witness.
building up the smaller guys will help make Witnesses more accountable.
steemit has a power concentration problem that we must address!