Do you want to be a steemit witness?

I decide to write this post after reading Hive account@teamsteem post. I suddenly realized I had no real idea on how steemit was run. I knew that steemit was a decentralized application that ran on a blockchain and that was it. I found out that to be a witness meant you either had to be a good programmer or computer savvy… to say the least. Also, there is a considerable amount of money that will be invested in Computer hardware (Servers). For some perspective, the top 20 steemit witnesses are all accomplished programmers.

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Steem witness
A Steem witness is a person out of a group of 21, who operates a witness server. The servers compute every action Steemians take and record them in blocks (new blocks are created every 3 seconds). It also publishes the price feed of STEEM/USD to the network(Yes...witnesses are responsible for the $7 per SBD). Processing blocks equates to processing transactions.

The Steemit witnesses have a privileged position in the ecosystem which gives them considerable power. Witnesses get voted in by the steemit community i.e. you and me. It is basically an election through a democratic process, if you don't vote, other people may vote in witnesses who are spiteful or simply untrustworthy. If elected, every steemit witness receives about 250 Steem power every day as a reward for their service.

Seed nodes

Source

The Basics Duties of Being a Witness include:

1. Running a witness node
2. Maintaining a pricefeed
3. Setting block size and account creation fee
4. Running RPC nodes and seed nodes according to needs

Requirement
If you are intrigued and know what you are doing, then you need the following to become a witness:
• A powerful server to run a witness node
• A powerful server to operate a Steem Seed node
• An accurate price feed of STEEM/USD everyday
• Creating a signing key, and communicating your intent to become a witness from cli_wallet
• Technical capabilities - you should have adequate knowledge of STEEM

Typical hardware requirement

Source

I encourage anyone interested in being a witness to get Hive account@someguy123's "Steem-in-the-box" he wrote in this post. Personally i would be reserving my votes for Hive account@reggaemuffin, Hive account@ausbitbank and Hive account@curie amongst others.

Thanks for reading