Is it possible to buy my way into being a top 20 witness?
Is there enough STEEM on the markets for me to vote myself into top 20 if so decided to?
Is it possible to buy my way into being a top 20 witness?
Is there enough STEEM on the markets for me to vote myself into top 20 if so decided to?
Number 20 right now is @utopian-io with 53,964M approval, or 13.59% of the total upvotes, according to steemd.com. The exact number is 53,963,817,252,985,466 on @utopian-io's account page.
According to @penguinpablo's last report (https://steemit.com/steem/@penguinpablo/weekly-report-how-much-steem-is-stored-on-the-exchanges-september-21-2018) there is 49,020,275 STEEM stored in exchanges, out of a total of 80,334,683 liquid STEEM and a STEEM supply of 277,168,974.
Now, I believe the approval weight = VESTS, and looking at the stats at SteemDB seems to bear that out, although it is confusing because they are currently two weeks out of date.. My VESTS is listed as 152,674 and my vote weight is 152,674.
So, let's assume that 53,964 M approval (ignoring all those extraneous digits) = 53,964 MVests.. We also have about 2020 VESTS = 1 STEEM, or 495 STEEM = 1 MVest. That means we need about 26,700,000 STEEM to vote somebody into the top 20. (That's at least a plausible number. It can't be 26.7 billion and it shouldn't be 26.7 thousand.)
There is currently enough STEEM in the exchanges for you to acquire that much, though at the current price of about $0.86 I don't think it's feasible (and certainly would move the market significantly.)
You might be able to lease some of the necessary SP instead of buying it.
Leased SP is 'upvoted' by the lessee, but the witness votes are still controlled by the owner. It might be feasible to construct an SP lease market where you delegate SP in exchange for proxy votes, though it would be very odd (the accounts that you would need proxies from would be accounts with high SP, and they would not need to lease much).
No, the amount of Steem you have, is not synonymous with becoming a top witness.
Witness are voted into the top 20 by accounts on the Steem blockchain. Members with accounts on the blockchain vote in accordance to what the witness has to offer to the community, and monetary worth is at the bottom of that checklist, if even present at all.
It would take so much Steem to game that system, that everyone would know what you're doing, and the other 19 tops (and entire community) would have no respect for you, whatsoever.
Musing doesn't let me answer my own question, but I was able to find the answer after some scouring, and it turns out that you actually can buy your way into becoming a top wintess. It would just cost about 26 MILLION STEEM as of now, so about $23,000,000 if prices remained the exact same(which they won't because of supply and demand). But all you would have to do is buy that much STEEM, and then start a witness node and finally vote yourself for witness. You might not become liked by the community and they may vote others to bring you down in ranks, but it does look like it is possible.
So the value of your vote affects the weight of the vote for witness? Wow I didn't know this, but I guess it makes sense. I should have looked into this a bit more before assuming I knew the answer. My apologies for answering incorrectly. This certainly is interesting to know.
Yeah, I didn't know that there was already info precompiled about how much mVests that each witness had received, but found out shortly after posting the question. You can find that information here : https://steemian.info/witnesses. The witness at rank 20(currently @utopian-io) has about 54 mVests voting for them. So if I could buy up 54 mVests worth of STEEM and power it up, I could theoretically become a top 20 witness. Only problem with that is that it'll get very very expensive. I could probably buy one million or so STEEM at the current price, but then the price will go up and it will end up costing me a lot more.
Thank you for the information! This is a gem of a database!
If you have the ability to buy a million Steem, I'm sure there are some people on the blockchain that would be very interested in talking with you. There are many projects going on right now that are looking for delegations, and partnership opportunities.
I'm by no means suggesting you shouldn't run a node. If that is something you have a passion, and an aptitude for, go for it, but I wouldn't limit yourself. Just the curation alone for an account with a million SP, is pretty juicy.
You can't buy your way into the top 20 witness spot but you can solicit your way into the top spot by coming out with a proeject that would benefit many steemians having high SP and ask for their witness vote in return. That's what most of the top 20 witnesses did. If your project benefit steemians and they see that you have the interest of steemit at heart, they would vote for you.
View this answer on Musing.io
View this answer on Musing.io
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Actually, thats wrong. Someone calculated the total amount of STEEM in exchanges and its possible to become in the low top 20s if you buy it all.