This is an excellent discussion on Witnesses, it is still a very misunderstood process. It’s important that every account uses their Witness votes - because they help ensure the blockchain keeps running smoothly which means you all can keep posting, upvoting and commenting.
The actual ranking of Witnesses is not just by votes though, the Steem Power of the Voter makes the real difference for position - so the biggest investors have the ultimate decision on who reaches the top 20.
Every vote counts though, and of course the small Steem power holders of today are the potential big holders of tomorrow.
Ohh...so having more Steem power will help us to vote better for our witnesses..
Did not know this...
And how are the Witnesses paid?through Steem power?
Witnesses get a producer reward for resolving a block on the blockchain - this only happens if their Witness server is active and processing transactions at the time it is callled to resolve a block. The frequency a Witness is called is based on the ranking - which is influenced as you now know by the Steem Power held by the voters. The higher your position the more frequent the producer reward - right now I get called for a block every 5 hours and receive 1 Steem Power in return. The top 20 are getting called for blocks every few minutes. The rewards need to contribute to server costs - which are expensive. And the top 20 run nodes as well which are even more expensive and have to be on very fast gigabit up and down internet connections to - most Nodes are on 512gb Ram and a few terabyte of SSD storage. They have to be as they form the main backbone for keeping the transactions on the Steem blockchain as fast as they are- in fact Steem is one of fastest crypto currencies for transaction speed.
A lot of information in there..so the top witnesses need to have best servers and internet..
Good to have all this information now..
The only thing from my understanding is that a witness runs a server. There are top 20 witnesses that outsource the server and do not engage in the platform....this is not a requirement but have always felt better about voting for witnesses that are accessible and not just interested in doing the minimum amount of work, the whole platform is essentially based on engagement and when you have active witness's the platform benefits
paid from a separate pool in the reward pool .11 per block and they get a certain number of blocks a day....witnesses in the top 20 get a lot more blocks.
Wow..that's not bad..would it be around 100 blocks per day for each witness?
This is a pretty fair estimate, there are more variables to consider, but until you reach top 20 I think a fair guess.
not bad bases on what? fiat ? these is where I have learned to shift my focus.