Recently team VIVA setup @viva.witness with the help of @someguy123
This node is on a high end server with oodles of ram and diskspace etc and it's being professionally managed by @someguy123 under our direction.
But what is a witness?
Witnesses are guardians of the blockchain!
Witnesses are responsible for finding blocks, seeding the blockchain and setting pricing feeds and interest rates. They are for the most part silent and you never really hear much about them. But they represent a major investment in the steem economy in terms of money and manpower.
With steem, the witnesses take turns finding blocks. But your priority as a witness is determined by how many votes as witness you get and the relative stake power behind those votes.
You as an end user can vote for up to 30 witnesses and you can change your witness vote at any time for any reason.
Voting for a witness is a way of saying "I support your work. I like what you're doing and I want you to continue doing it."
Conversely, removing your vote from a witness is a good way to let them know that you no longer agree with them or their policies.
As @the-ego-is-you mentioned earlier, there has been a lot of back and forth lately between some of the witnesses and some people find this to be toxic.
You can show your support or lack thereof, by voting for witnesses that represent your interests.
In this way, the witness system also serves as a sort of mini-political system.
I have no illusions of running for office. I don't now if you agree or disagree with my politics or not. However my group @vivacoin has recently launched a new exchange where you can buy and sell STEEM along with other currencies.
Deposit a dollar, get back a dollar. It's a simple concept really.
What makes TradeQwik really special is that all market pegged instruments are fungible. That means if you want to deposit your SBD you get USD credit directly and if you want to withdraw your USD you can do so as SBD, or as cash at our ATMs or just put it on your debit card (yes we issue debit cards).
bitUSD and several others are on the horizon as well.
Why vote for @viva.witness?
- We're providing a dollar backed price feed for SBD and STEEM and there are 0 trading fees on limit orders at this time.
- Our price feed will be market driven straight off of TradeQwik and as TradeQwik and VIVA grow, so too will steem.
- The price feed we publish, is the price the market actually supports and we are willing and able to buy and sell at the price we publish.
*TradeQwik is also the only exchange that powers up our entire cold wallet and uses that to upvote our customers. We plan to market this feature heavily in the coming months, to markets outside of the normal cypherpunk/cryptonerd realm, which will bring additional business to the platform. Voting for @viva.witness shows us that you support the idea of bringing steem to the masses.
Why did VIVA setup a witness in the first place?
In order to accomplish all this, we determined that it would be best if we were to take a more active role in the steem economy at large. By setting up a witness, we are able to help stabilize the price and also we are able to gain a deeper insight into the wants and needs of the community.
So I'm going to ask for your witness vote if you think what we are doing is a good thing.
But more than that, I'm going to teach you how to vote for witnesses and I'm going to ask you to research every witnesses on the list and ask yourself if you support them, or if your vote would better be spent on someone else?
How do we vote for witnesses?
First go to the "hamburger menu" in the upper right hand corner of the screen and click to open the flyout menu.
Next go about 3/4ths of the way down and click "Vote for Witnesses"
This will bring up the witness voting screen.
I'd like you to spend some time here. These are the top 50 witnesses. Get to know them. You can vote for 30 of them and there isn't a good reason for you not to be doing this. These guys represent you and your interests at great expense to themselves.
Right now though, @viva.witness is not listed.
But don't despair, if you'd like to vote for our witness, just scroll down a little bit and find the box and fill it out.
It's really that easy!
Now a few final words about witnessing in general. Setting up and maintaining a witness node is a huge responsibility. But if you're planning to run a business that directly interfaces with the steem ecosystem, there is no better way to do it than as a witness.
Our good friend @someguy123 has made a habit of under promising and over delivering in this department. He's the guy who created "steem in a box" which you can use free of charge.
He works tirelessly on products that make steem easier to deploy and his stuff just works with very minimal configuration. However if you're considering running a witness node for yourself and you don't really have the time or expertise to devote to the 24/7 headaches that come with this commitment, I highly recommend you hire him to set it up and run it according to your needs and tastes. He's literally the best sysadmin I've ever met and his prices are extremely reasonable and well deserved.
In my next topic, I'm going to share the list of witnesses I support and explain why. But I don't want to influence you as a new voter at this stage. Explore the various witnesses, read their reports, see how they're doing and give them your upvotes. Maybe pop into their threads sometime and let them know you're supporting them and why.
Thank you for reading this and remember like always...
This post is 100% steem powered!
Thank you for directing me to this, very helpful, may I post your link to this post into my post for others :)
Yes please!
Its done , please check it out ... :D
Voted for witness and reblogged post. Congratulations on taking this initiative.
Thank you so much for the vote, the resteem and the compliments! It means a lot!
Mad respect for your work @williambanks. Always making new steps to improve steem financially and as a social network in general. Will not forget your efforts in bringing the steem enconomy to the forefront, especially in the field of medicine. You got my vote!
Thanks for clarifying this, some of us lay people need this information... it helps in the faith of the platform.
You're welcome! I'm glad you enjoyed it and learned something new. Voting is a huge thing but so few people actually take the time to do it. I hope I've inspired you to learn who these people are and to participate in the vital but unsung part of the economy.
@williambanks I love your post
there are so many posts that says vote for this witness
but what is a witness? It doesn't really explain much and for a newbie - it could sometimes be confusing.
I love it that you pointed out - they're the guardians of the block chain and we actually owe them not experiencing cybil attack anymore. Not to mention the fork .. and so many other things.
I totally agree on this, and I also carefully chose my witnesses. If they really show concern to improve Steemit (which you could only see on how they write here or perform or the programs they create or support so we'd grow ... even how they upvote posts - I take that in consideration, too .
I vote for them ... I haven't voted for many yet, how many are we supposed to vote? Anyhow, I'm looking forward to your post! Again, always glad to find you posting again :)
Have a great weekend!
Wow! Thank you so much for the kind words. I'm really glad the post was thought provoking. You have a good point about the sybil attacks. I was considering mentioning that as well, but decided to hold off since that's a difficult one to explain to new comers and this post was already pretty chock full by the time I was getting around to it.
You have a great weekend too!
@williambanks it's actually S i was wondering why it was underlined red while typing "cybil" - damn .. wrong spelling wahahahha
thank you now I got it right :)
Lol, I never even noticed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_(1976_film)
Done!
Thanks a lot for the important information and the proactive activism.
All for one and one for all! Namaste :)
There was a new version of steemit.com that released today. It's possible you have the older version cached in your browser.
Try logging out, hitting F5 and then logging back in. I was having a similar issue earlier.
update For anyone coming along wondering what I'm talking about in my reply here, @eric-boucher was mentioning earlier he couldn't vote. My reply was explaining how I had a similar issue earlier.
Great post on witnesses! I just voted for viva.witness. Resteemed and tweeted. Go Team VIVA!
we need all witnesses to make a post of what they are doing and what their goals for the platform are. Then we as voters can make educated votes.
This is not american politics is it?
and great post... ^^
where can we see a list of all witness not just the top 50?
User friendly way to see top 100:
https://steemdb.com/witnesses
or
https://steemd.com/witnesses
You can use
cli_wallet'slist_witnessescommand, but that would make no much sense because such list would include also accounts used for miners. A lot of them.Take a look at #witness-category, feel free to join to #witness channel on steemit.chat, talk to your witnesses. That is a way better method to choose your set of favourite 30 than just looking at a list of nicknames ;-)
Thanks for the compliments @solarguy
Many witnesses do make a report about once a week. Some don't and those are ones we should really be looking at carefully. @dantheman was mentioning in a recent blog posting that some people may have forgotten they are even running a witness node, but they stay in the top 50 because people have forgotten that they voted for them.
I consider that situation to be very bad. Witnesses have a responsbility to the the blockchain, but individuals have a responsibility to the community to know who their voting for and why. They should assess and re-assess their votes on a regular basis.
I tend to do mine on the first of the month.
I do wonder if there is an easy way to see who's witnesses are performing well and not missing blocks or broadcasting wild price feeds etc.
I know you can go one by one through them via the commandline.
Maybe what we need is a regular weekly "meta-witness" report.
I totally forgot. I was aware of who i had voted for but now that you mention it I want to change some votes.
I really like @timcliff and @jesta, solid folks great updates and they really care about the greater good though I don't always agree with their decisions i respect them. Some others I like too. But i have certainly taken some votes away. I don't know if you're a witness I can't see you on the list.
Whats happening to my home ><
I'm not a witness, but voting for @viva.witness is the same as voting for me since that one is under my control.
As for how to see all the witnesses and not just the top 50, the only way I can think of is to loop through the entire accounts list and look for people posting price feeds since that's a witness only activity.
This works too https://steemit.com/created/witness-category
cool thanks man
Excellent information, and a good initiative. I will give my vote to viva.witness.
Resteemed.
Thank you so much for your vote and your resteem. It really means a lot.
Voted!
@kus-knee (The Old Dog)
d.o.n.e. :)
Voted for witness and re-steemed. Thanks!
Thank you for this post, I was just going to ask you how in Slack and saw this! Haha! You rock! Voted as witness and resteemed!
upvoted and followed. thank you for this post man.
You're very welcome. I've followed back. How is it possible you've been here since September and never posted a blog despite having hundreds of followers and nearly 400 posts? Or is that some bug I'm seeing?
I only comment and curate for now brother. I comment daily/read daily. When the time comes I think I will take up blogging.
Awesome! I look forward to reading it. Your comments are insightful and positive.
This post has been ranked within the top 80 most undervalued posts in the second half of Feb 17. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $5.32 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Feb 17 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
If you are the author and would prefer not to receive these comments, simply reply "Stop" to this comment.
How shall I select my witnesses... Like anything particular to lookout for... I am new to steemit ....
Awesome post! You have my Vote!! Keep On Steemin On!
Didn't even know about this until now. Thank you so much for explaining clearly.
I appreciate this post.... I must say that Steem community is strong and one day number of users might even reach and cross that of Facebook...... We are moving on to a new era.... 😎
how will voting help the user who has voted?
I just get my answer from your post.....i hope services are better as like your post....keep it up ...thanks a lot for very very informative post....
It's half and half what I'm understanding from the "witness program", same time I'm thinking it's basically saying.. "I'm placing my vote on you as long as you hold up your end of the bargain to continue the good work helping other steemians recognize the importance of this growing online community." That's my take on it.. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Great Post BTW
This clears up a lot, thanks for posting how to "vote" for a witness
Hey thanks for the explanation!
Thank you for this really good and easy explanation.
he won't answer he's in jail apparently
So when you vote for a witness, the usernames become green under the box where you type who to vote for. And then what? That counts as one vote right?
But then it disappears when you go back to the witness voting page, it goes back to you have 30 votes. So how many times should we vote then?And how do we know the vote went in?
As a newbie, there's a big question mark in my head. I really don't understand & keep looking for the answer. Finally, I know what witnesses is about. Even though, this writing already 11 months old but it very useful for new steemians like me. Thanks for sharing it.
I found this to be extremely insightful as well as helpful.
Very useful information. I am new and wanted to know what voting for witnesses is and your post cleared it for me. Thanks.
Thank you for the insight on this topic. I really was lost on the voting thing and why I even needed to vote in the first place. Again thank you. I will be voting for @viva.witness.
I tried to understand it , but I couldn't . What witness does to your steemit account ?
tx for topic still i need more time
Thanks for your article.i really learn about it
good content