@moderator: Oh, believe me, uh, we want this to be more professional and we want this to be more, uh, to have a better flow. Yes, this is the first time that we're doing it. We hope to get better at it.
Going back to the topic that crim is saying, one of the main goals of this town hall would be to have, let's say we have 20 top witnesses and 10 backup witnesses. And for those who don't know, the top 20 are the ones that run most of the chain. Then the backup witnesses are from the 21 to the 30, which run some blocks in between the top 20.
And then you have all the other, uh, witnesses and depending on the, on the rank that they are means how many blocks during a day or during a week they actually process.The point of this town hall would be, so let's say we have 30, uh, with witnesses at the top, maybe bringing five, maybe bringing six every, every three months, every quarter, every six months, whatever, and just have them share.
Hey, I am a witness number seven, my name is Pedro and I'm going and I do this for the chain and then this, this actually takes off that weight from their backs of having to, "Oh, I have to, uh, share with the community what I'm doing or who I am or for the newbies who come and do not know what I do."
Well, maybe you can just come here, every three months and just speak about your witness, what you do, just take 15 minutes and that's it. And the point is to push this Town Hall to everyone, so nobody misses it.
@khallelkazi: I was just gonna echo on, uh, something Crim said, which is, uh, and, and, you know, the general topic, which is, you know, getting More updates from, from the top 20, um, and we kind of talked about it at the beginning too, is, you know, a lot of the top 20 are not active in terms of posting and stuff, you know, in terms of posting and just in general, like communication, but you know, that's not necessarily a bad thing and I don't think that, you know, you should just rule out a witness and say, Oh, they haven't made a post in the last, you know, six months, they must not very active.
A lot of them are active at a more technical or kind of background layer. But that being said, I still think we should get some sort of update from most of these witnesses at some point and without pointing out to anybody in particular, there are plenty of witnesses that don't really have any front facing updates or notices of any kind.
So that's definitely something I've been a proponent of for a long time is.Even if a witness isn't a communicator and it's not their natural thing to be putting out updates on a weekly or even monthly basis, I think coming to these town halls or doing a space at some point or a post, no matter how brief, I think just some level of update should be kind of some kind of requirement of a top 20 witness.
@taskmaster4450: I think it's very important. The number one job of a witness, and I even put this in the threadtest, we're the only ones really who use that name. Most call them block producers, node producers, block validators, something like that.
The most important thing witnesses do is keep this blockchain running. And I've heard people say, well, they should post once a week about what's going on, or I don't think it's too much expect or once a month. What are you gonna post? The node didn't break down, we kept processing blocks? That's what they're supposed to do.
What Khal said is true, a lot of the witnesses are technical people. They're not blog posters, they're not people who write articles. They're technical people and obviously, there's a huge technical component to this. So where is that line? Maybe it's just leftover residual from the old days.
There is a problem because we see people, we see nodes from people who aren't even on Hive anymore. They are no longer here. They haven't even been here since we forked three years ago, yet they still have 20 million or 30 million votes or whatever in terms of Hive power.
So this comes back to each of us consistently looking at the witnesses we're voting for. Who are you voting for? Are they people who are around? And as Khal says, I will echo that. Just because somebody's not posting every day doesn't mean that they're not doing anything. Doesn't mean that their node's not operating. Doesn't mean that they're not performing, uh, services for the blockchain because a lot of times what these people do. It's not evident. It's not out there. They're constantly going through, uh, high blocks. They're constantly pulling stuff and data from the blockchain and looking at it and working on problems, working on codes. You get onto the, you listen to the, the dev call that Howo posts, uh, you know, every couple of weeks or once a month, however often they have them.
And suddenly you start seeing names there like Gandalf, who's not necessarily around, but You know, he's working on base layer coding. So these are things that, again, it goes back to conversation, what we're talking about, what we're, we're opening up avenues where if somebody isn't going to write a 1500 word post, that's not their thing fine they could come on to something like this, you know, and if you are looking to give your witness votes to people and you prefer to be giving it to people you know are doing something, then maybe look for those people who are on these spaces, who are around, who show up on the developer calls, you know, who are on threads, who are commenting, who, who do different things.
I mean, Arcange is a prime example. There's somebody who's a developer, but he was on this call. He was on the spaces with me after one of the HiveFest days. He presented at HiveFest. You know, there's somebody who does a lot for the blockchain, but it may not be known to everybody, but at least people on this call are starting to see them around.
And if that's what you feel is a, a variable for you to place a a witness vote, then fine. Look for those people.
@moderator: And this also resonates with the idea that @town-hall has, of course, the idea of having a team witness, is kind of new for Hive. We don't believe it's the only way to do it. Of course, there can be individual witnesses.
There can be team witnesses. There can be that witnesses. But in our case, we decided, okay, we have, we need to have a tech side. We need to have a business side. We need to have an economic side. We need to have a social side. And that's how this witness came to be. The fact that, okay, maybe the developer cannot make the posts, but we have another person that can make the posts.
@khaleelkazi: I was just gonna say, um, I forget who made the point, but, uh, you know, a few points back, um, you know, it's, or I guess it was Tafs talking about, you know, producing blocks is the number one responsibility of witnesses, um, and I definitely agree with that, you know, I mean, You have to run your node. You have to produce the blocks.
You know, that's kind of why you're there is to secure the blockchain. But, you know, I think a big misconception is that running a node and producing blocks is actually a very kind of passive activity. There's, you know, Very little technical, technical aspect to it and maintenance in terms of things that you actually have to do, you might have to do something once a month.
I do agree that, you know, your main function as a witness is to produce blocks, but I, I also think that if. You're a witness and the only thing you're doing is producing blocks, uh, that's kind of, uh, it's kind of a misallocation of a witness, in my opinion, and that might be a hot take for some people, but, um, I think in order to be a top 20 or top 30 or whatever, you know, you should be doing a lot more than just producing blocks, and I really like what, what you said earlier, Eric, that a key function of a witness is to, you know, one, be the voice of the people and to be a representative Both on, you know, internally to Hive and externally to the outside world.
@moderator: Yes, and I do think that there is a lot of witnesses that, okay, yes, I produce the blocks, but I also, I don't know, run a curation system. Or I run the blocks, but I also develop these dApps. Or I run the nodes, but I also do this and that. So I think those are the witnesses that provide the most value to the blockchain.
But that being said, we also need, the more witnesses we have, even if they just run blocks, they add value to the blockchain. But yes, as, as Khal says, and I do agree, the bar is very high. Right now for, for the top 20 in the sense of "if you want to be on the top, you have not only to, to have a node or to produce blocks, but you also have to add more value to the community the way that you want it to be, but there has to be an added value".
@l337m45732: I just wanted to ask something first. Uh, I wanted to listen to what Tasmata was saying. And it is that sometimes we don't see some witnesses posting at a day or anything about it related to that because many things that a witness do is produce blocks.
You can see it inside of the blockchain. Some people don't know about it. There is a tool that I think Khal and Leoteam built is called High, hivestats. And people could do, could go there, just put the name of the witness and the, the username and you will see how many blocks they have produced, how much HP there are getting from that. Many other stuff that you can see there. And that's something that in my case, I didn't want to do a post about it because people should go there and see, and there is tons of other tools that you can use for that too. Uh, in my experience, what I did was, just read a post about how you can set a witness though, without much problems nowadays.
And I think that was something that could bring some utility to people that don't know about how. I don't know how to do that. Um, that was the thing that I do mostly because hivecuba is not a witness that you could, that is Only, uh, producing blocks. There is also a community that is, has a, a curating system that is also is bringing some thoughts about high in Cuba, marketing high inside Cuba, and bringing some more, things to it that, that are outside of the blockchain.
So no, there is no many, uh, I don't know. Uh, we don't usually talk about our own chain, but, uh, There are many things that we do all shame, that sometimes people don't know about that it's there. You can look at it, that we have a, a web to source for that, that sometimes we don't have the time to, to more people on chain about it, but it's there.
So sometimes we, we just, we just need to look a little deep then. Just the, the witness is stable for that. Um, producing block, uh, that was the, the question they see. What is a block?
@crimsonclad: So, blocks, one of the easiest ways to think about this, and I often explain them in really sort of easy to understand terms.
Blocks are like big groups of transactions. Think about everything that happens on Hive every few seconds. You've got votes, you've got comments, you've got posts, you've got JSONs. All of the things that happen on Hive, when you broadcast them, they need to be checked if they follow Hive's rules. So a block is basically when a witness node, a server, if you want to call it that, and I'll explain nodes in a second, a block is a big group of transactions that a witness node checks to make sure they follow Hive's rules.
That's the easiest way to think about it. Think of a block as a box full of transactions. The witness's job, when it gets handed a block, when it's their turn in shuffle, they get a block, they will quickly check all the transactions inside that block to make sure that they follow the rules of Hive. If they do, the block goes into the chain and is quickly checked over by the rest of Consensus.
Consensus matches, boom, the block is in the chain.
So when you think about a blockchain, and all of the blocks that are lined up in a row, they are big boxes full of valid transactions. And the way that they're ordered in the chain is, here's the order in time that they happened. And each witness goes down, And is producing these blocks, is checking these transactions, and they're all working together to put these blocks full of transactions in a line.
And then they share that information with all of the other nodes. So that's the easiest, easiest way to understand what a block is. It's very simplified, but in terms of when you understand what happens when you click on a transaction and send it out into space, that's what's happening in the background with your block producers.
This is also why it's kind of important to vote for good witnesses, because obviously you want witnesses that are using the rules that everybody agrees on, right? We want to make sure that the rules of Hive are what we think they are. That is why when you vote for a witness and they're running a version of Hive that you want.
It's very important. A hard fork is a decision. Are we going to change these rules or not? And that's why witness voting around hard forks is really important too. But the easiest way to think about it is Every three seconds, there's a new block full of transactions and a witness is going to get it and double check that everything in it looks good and then share that information with the rest of the witnesses.
That's where the blockchain comes from. And then the only other thing is I saw some terminology around node. Node is, I see task answered, it's a server. One of the easiest ways to think about this is basically, you can set up a witness server in a couple of different ways. So nodes are that, that machine running that software that does something.
There are three different ways to handle it. One is a block producer, which is a witness. One is a seed node. Which is something that propagates blocks and gets them ready for witnesses. And one is an RPC node, which is basically the one that goes back and forth between the blockchain and your services, moving information.
So when you ask on a front end, I'd like to make a vote. The RPC node is the thing in the middle that runs back and forth between the blockchain and serves that information to either you or to a front end. And those three things are all basically part of when you're running infrastructure for Hive. How you set up your configuration, you could be any of those things.
Those nodes are all very similar and they're all parts of how the blockchain is produced. And they're all things that witnesses and infrastructure providers run. On behalf of everybody that uses this blockchain.
@moderator: And that is exactly why we, uh, uh, value that Crim is here to, to, to make things easy for everyone to understand because remember the point of this town-hall is to bring the concepts and bring the the intricacies of the blockchain of the high blockchain and make them of easy access and easy understanding for everyone on-chain, doesn't matter how, how long have you been here, but, uh, the point is to get everyone involved and, and to understand the important parts of a blockchain.
@l337m45732: I just wanted to add to that. You know, we got, we went a little in depth there. Thank you, Crim, for explaining blocks and nodes. Uh, and I feel like I need to clarify this because those questions came up.
When we talk about transactions, we're not talking about, you know, a buyer, a seller, we're talking about anything you do on Hive. So whether it's a comment, whether it's a post, whether it's a vote, maybe you do make a transaction on the internal market. All of those are transactions that happen on the blockchain.
And the producers make sure those are valid. So... Yeah, it's not just monetary things, transactions are everything that happens on the chain. It all has to be validated.
@moderator: We are about to wrap up if the, if, if someone else wants to add anything to the conversation just raise your hand and I will hand you the mic
@bookerman: We have the benefit of being a truly decentralized platform. And I know, uh, when I went out, uh, representing Woo and Hive, uh, at Rare Evo and, uh, Breathe, that was one thing that. Really blew people away that we were truly a decentralized platform, and that was a huge selling point, uh, for for us, but one of the, you know, the, the, the negatives of that is since there's no company, there's no marketing team, there's there's no one telling people what to do.
And we have to have awesome people like Crimsonclad and Eric and so many others that do these things, do these Twitter spaces, go out to these, these events, uh, and really preach Hive. And you'd be surprised when you go out to these events and how the people come together. Like, at Breathe, uh, for example, having all those people there, uh, the locals in Rare, uh, Rare Evo, having the locals there that came out and helped set things up, talk to people, uh, and did all that, it's really amazing to see a community come together and be like, look what we did, this is who we are, this is what we do.
It was a really beautiful thing and we just need more people to constantly step up, uh, and do these thankless jobs. Um, and, and, uh, I really appreciate Eric, you holding these spaces, crim, everything you do, guilty parties, uh, all the people with the value plan. Uh, again, it's, it's really amazing to see, and this is a huge asset, a huge benefit of this chain.
And that's all, that's all I wanted to end on.
@taskmaster4450: I personally think this was a great, uh, introductory, uh, town hall. We plan on having them once a month.
We may have to negotiate the day as crim said, because. Uh, there is a conflict with the Core Dev meeting, so maybe we have to move it to another Monday or another day of the week. Also, just to give a reminder, I started hosting on Friday, and I'm going to do it every week. Hopefully every Friday at 1 o'clock Eastern Time, a space is called This Week in Hive.
So if you enjoyed this, uh, it will be a similar format where I'll come on, I may have some base. Topics of what I've seen across high, but people can join. They can talk about whatever projects they're involved in, whatever projects they're utilizing, whatever they know about, whatever questions they have.
It's education. It's for information. And it's just another way to put us on spaces to put us on X that maybe somebody will come along and learn something about Hive and join the blockchain, um, and take a look at what we have to offer. So, uh, if there's nothing else, I think we should close this up.
@l337m45732: Last thing I wanted to say thank you to everyone that came on Thank you for those of you that grabbed the mic and jumped in.
See you in November 1st for the next Hive Community Town Hall Meeting.
The End