Trusted personas that keep the chain safe
I understand this to encompass also keeping and standing for the fundamental values of the chain, for example decentralization. The whole point of this blockchain experiment (at least for me) is that we want to create an improvement in the world, it's not just for crypto price go high, even if that last thing can help make things happen.
Produce blocks reliably
This one doesn't seem very important to me, or rather I see an altogether different design as more resilient. Instead of trying to achieve a fewer (by economic necessity) number of highly reliable nodes, we can have a larger number of nodes, even if any one of them is relatively less reliable, where each node can take over and cover for any downtime of another node. This would make the network as a whole highly more resilient and robust.
I also look for voluntary activity done in support of the chain, whether it's building community or building things or popularizing in some way or being engaged in discussions and offering ideas, or whatever else.
No, unless you have entirely different consensus algorithm in mind. But we have this one, and reliability of block production among consensus witnesses is exactly what it makes it resilient and robust. :-)
Oh, right, thanks for pointing it out.
So we actually have this, there are something like 400+ active witness nodes, the list pages on most of the interfaces just don't show that many. Because below a certain number, they have almost no vote support nor do they cycle into rotation unless hundreds above them fail over, but they ARE there, paying for servers with little to no remuneration for their support of the chain's block processing power, speed and infrastructure.
But the pay scale is so tilted toward the top 20, that it causes a lot of churn in these lower level witness nodes, they come and go and due to lack of expiring votes, remain as disabled, and having to be accounted for on the list pages and the chain scheduling algo itself, discarding those who are not active anymore. There is no way for a witness to completely resign on their own, only for their voters to completely remove all weight from them. My own dead st33m witness hasnt run in years, but has voters,who likewise are unreachable (ive checked) who left votes on them and then disappeared completely, without removing those votes. That dead witness continues to clutter up the witness lists (way down in the 400s but still) and has to be accomodated as inactive in the chain scheduling code. Extra cycles that could be avoided by allowing a witness to cancel all votes on itself and "quit" if they need to or want to for any reason at all.
But yeah, in summary, we have hundreds of nodes - resilient and failover by design, but nobody knows they exist.