Witness Voting plays a big part in Steemit. Everyone has a right to vote for 30 witnesses. But not everyone votes, and some people appoint a proxy to vote on their behalf.
A recent post from 
However
Did you know that 4290 steemit accounts have set a proxy to do their witness voting for them? That means all of the SP owned by these 4290 accounts are in the hands of others to use as they wish on witness votes. I have identified 293 proxies
The total Vesting shares from Steemsql @ 16:34 on 07/11 was 389.74nb, of which 11% has been allocated to a proxy
The top proxies in terms of number of accounts that have set them as proxy can be seen in the table below. It’s an indicator of popularity.
However if we look at the Controlling vesting shares (which is the owned vesting shares plus the proxied vesting shares) we can see a different perspective.
Of all of the proxy accounts, 
Looking further at the values for,
Just wondering something, what do you consider centralised?
But 
As
We can now look at this data based on the used vests of 122.61bn. A 51% control of this is made up of 22 accounts as seen in the table below
@Pumpkin control 11% of the actual vests used to vote on witnesses
The witnesses in the top 50 that are also proxies, between them control 20% of the actual vests used in witness voting.
11 accounts holding 31% of the voting power. This is really interesting.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@paulag/unmasking-freedom-what-the-data-can-tell-us-steemit-business-intelligence
You see 
These are the same accounts identified as connected to
Looking at the 11 account which hold 31% of the voting power, and let’s add back in @Minoriry-reports 
Lets see how they have voted when it comes to their witness votes
This table shows how these accounts voted for each other in terms of witness
And this table shows other witnesses that have the most amount of shared votes from these account.
I find it very interesting from these charts that
Conclusion
There are a number of accounts (11), which combined hold 31% of the voting power for the witness list. I know if I keep digging I will find the account that make up 51% which is a majority holding.
I guess we all need to take care when appointing a proxy for witness voting, and made sure we agree with who the proxy is voting for to represent you as a witness.
This analysis also shows a problem when it comes to new witnesses reaching the top 20, if a small few hold the majority of the power, then unless you get in with this golden circle, the changes of making it to the top 20 will be very difficult
The analysis also highlights a need for some sort of witness awareness campaign. Only a third of all vests are used for witness voting, either with a proxy or selecting your own witnesses. If we could get more people on Steemit to engage with witness voting the balance of power could be shifted.
I am part of a Steemit Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #BIsteemit. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit data, please do contact me or any of the #bisteemit team and we will do our best to help you...y
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