Yes and no.
Bitcoin mining anyone can do with the right hardware.
When running a STEEM witness you need community votes in order to be allowed to produce blocks. All witnesses do is collect operations such as votes and transfers and put them into a block, every 3 seconds.
Voting Process:
I understand that a witness has to go through the voting process to become a witness in the first place. I understand how blockchain works, the process and operation of submitting transactions to the blocks every 3 seconds like you said, and I understand that is not how Bit Torrent, etc, works, specifically, that they are technically different in how they work.
Hybrid
But why not a hybrid approach? I would suggest having the witnesses as the core of Steem. On top of that, I would try to utilize something like IPFS, like seeding, like whatever Bitchute uses, in decentralizing and distributing the data of the Steem blockchain across the world wide web. My objective is simply in trying to decentralize as much of how Steem works as possible.
Option
At the very least, I would try to make it an option and not a requirement. I guess what I'm getting at is concerning platforms or apps or dapps that are built on Steem and not Steem itself. So, I guess I am mostly talking about how Steemit.com, Busy.org, Partiko, and other Steem apps work. I don't know how the different apps work specifically. But I would, assuming that they are not already, find ways to decentralize how the apps work in distributing data across the web to limit centralization. In doing so, people should be paid in helping in that process via things like Bit Torrent seeding and people should be paid, compensated, in Steem, in money, in cryptocurrencies, etc, or whatever, for helping in sharing the load. So, perhaps, they can't or shouldn't be the witnesses. I understand that.
Mining, Seeding
But I would argue and say that more people could seed or mine or help distribute Steem around the Internet via IPFS, P2P, and/or as many different things as possible. Perhaps what I am talking about does not have to be directly connected to Steem itself and be done indirectly or separate from Steem. I've heard that there are cryptocurrency-like Bit Torrent projects out there that does or will attempt at compensating the seeders via cryptocurrencies. I'm talking about Internet 3.0 which means the attempts at decentralizing the Internet. For example, there is one project called Substratum. And there are others as well.
We had POW mining in the beginning.
All STEEM happens to be is a decentralized database. However the majority of the blocks are created by the top 20 witnesses voted by the community.
I'm not against what you are saying here.. However as it sits I don't see it happening any time soon as would be regarded as taking a step backwards.
So, Steem had proof of works (POW) mining. So, now it is proof of brains or what is it right now? What kind of mining would you prefer and how many kinds of mining are there? I believe there are around 5 different kinds. I am still not totally sure which I would prefer. Yeah, I agree that many of these things may not change any time sooner, perhaps. I am simply here to encourage people to talk about making things better, assuming it is even possible to improve the system. But not to say that I am right about what I say. I am only trying to suggest ideas that might help. But I could be wrong concerning the specific details.
Yeah, I get what you are saying.
Right now we have value subjective voting that does the "mining" / post rewards or whatever you want to call it.. Plus the witnesses that facilitate this.
Not sure we'll ever see POW mining come back.
No worries, It is certainly not the easiest crypto to get your hands on unless you're a highly supported witness, a well voted blogger or someone who can afford to buy STEEM.
What are the rules? In order to be a witness, first you have to be running a Steem node and secondly, you have to get a certain amount of votes? How many votes would be the minimum required?
The strength of the votes you receieve dictate how high your rank is, and how many blocks a day your server can create.
Here is a question. Does a witness earn Steem for mining blocks? I'm assuming that blocks are mined like Bitcoin blocks are mined by miners. I don't want to say Bitcoin and Steem are identical but this is my comparison. If I'm accurate, then that makes sense and I would prefer that over how Bitcoin does it I think.