What does it mean to be a witness?
Witnesses are members of the community, voted in by other members of the community. They require a powerful machine, are must be active to monitor their machine. These witnesses perform a similar duty to the steem network, similar to how bitcoin miners secure the bitcoin blockchain.
Witnesses in the Top 19 are compensated handsomely for their duties in steem power, at approximately 1370 Steem Power per day. Witnesses in the 20 - 50 slots, only get around 30-60 steem power per day: a sharp drop from the Top 19.
So what do the Top 19 witnesses do with their powered down funding, amounting to about 550 USD per day? (Assuming they could power it down all at once -- realistically it is less than that, but still high.)
Ask them.
Recent events in witness changes.
Recently, we saw a large change in the structure of the witness list. Two high powered steemians voted and unvoted. So what's the story?
Val-a started voting in witnesses. Who is val? Val is an employee of Steemit, Inc, and has a considerable amount of stake in the system. You can check this list to see how much stake a user has for witnesses they vote on.
This appears to have caused some waves in the list, as 
Previously, most steemit employees did not vote. Even 
Let's look at some data.
Here's the current list as of this morning, followed by two new lists:
- Re-organizing the top 50 by "Community Vote".
- The number of users, disregarding user stake, that are voting for them as a witness.
- Re-organizing the top 50 by "No Employee Votes".
By community vote
Arguably, this vote type is sybil attack-able, and I would not want to see this as the way to determine the Top 50, so take this data with a grain of salt. However, as far as I am aware, most users with multiple accounts use voting proxies to use their stake in voting with their multiple accounts. So the list is a good approximation of community support for a user.
The biggest movers and shakers on this list are as follows:
- On the way up:
- And on the way down:
What does this data imply? There are some users that are in the Top list that do not have community support, but are in the list merely by association with the whales. There are also some users with high community support, but are not on the Top list.
No employee votes
This is an interesting one: What if the employees were not allowed to vote on witnesses, and leave the decision of the community members witnessing the blockchain, up to the community?
The biggest movers and shakers on this list are as follows:
- On the way up:
- And on the way down:
So what would this mean for the structure of the Top 19 witnesses?
Lets look at how the Top 19 would change.
- By community vote.
- No employee votes.
And one final experiment: Whom do the employees not touch?
Suppose we took out every user in the Top 50 that is voted on by any employee. This shows a group of steemians whom the devs dare not touch:
Funny enough, we wouldn't even have a full 19 witnesses out of the Top 50. This means that more or less, the entire witness list is shaped and controlled, hand selected by Steemit, Inc.
But what if the employees are benevolent?
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
Winston Churchill
There is no official reason why steemit employees cannot vote. There is only the community perception on whether or not they should vote.
Steemit has shown that they are not opposed to taking over the witness list, and hard forking. They did this after the "hack", using the 
How does the community feel about this? Do you want the control of your account in the hands of Steemit, Inc? They have enough steem power with the steemit account, let alone all the employee accounts, to simply take over the witness list whenever they choose, and push a hard fork that takes all YOUR earned SBD and Steem. But they don't, because they are benevolent. For now.
So who do the Steemit employees vote for? Let's look at the bitshares witness list, whom also get rewarded handsomely for running a witness node.
From: http://cryptofresh.com/witnesses
Any names ring a bell?
Show me the source.
Fortunately, the blockchain is transparent, so it is really quite simple.
Here's an example of the code used to generate this data. First, grab a list from https://steemdb.com/api/topwitnesses name it witnesses.json, and run something like this in python:
import json
import operator
with open('witnesses.json') as data_file:
data = json.load(data_file)
output = {}
for witness, voters in data.items():
witness_sum = 0.0;
for voter in voters:
weight = voter['weight']
if (voter['name'] not in ['dan', 'dantheman', 'val-a', 'ned']):
witness_sum += weight
output[witness] = witness_sum
sorted_output = sorted(iter(output.items()), key=operator.itemgetter(1), reverse=True)
for u, v in sorted_output:
print(u)