What are witnesses and what have they done?
There's a lot of mixed information on Steemit as to what a witness does, they are a person who operates a server, which produces blocks and publishes a price feed of Steem tokens to Us Dollars.
Steemit is a social platform powered by a decentralized blockchain called Steem. Steem is based on graphene which is powering Bitshare also. It's delegated proof of stake blockchain which work are different to another consensus to finding algorithms, like Bitcoin proof of work and other coins with proof of stake. Not every stakeholder or participant takes part in the block producting process. Only a selected few which are voted by the stakeholders. The witnesses are basically the ones securing the blockchain, managing your transactions and making a consensus between different node. You can run your own note but you will always get your data from the witnesses.
Basically, the witnesses are like governors of the federal reserve system. Witnesses secure the blockchain that means that they collectively decide on the version of Steemit is running and where Steemit will go. If developers or somebody else comes up with an idea. Like changing the setting which requires a hard fork and the basics of the chain like how SBD are created. Another word, the developers are kind of like the mayor wants to change something and you guys the city council, can either say yes or no.
The witnesses also expected to provide an ongoing price feed of Steem tokens in U.S. dollars. The witnesses are generally voted for because they are trusted members of the community. Witnesses are expected to keep a block-producing Steem node running 24 hrs a day and 7 days a week. They are rewarded for their services and running their node by getting powered up by one Steem for each block they produce. They create the Steem blockchain in real time every 3 seconds. Every 63 second, we are trusting the top 20 witnesses to produce one block for us. The top 50 witnesses from 21 to 50 produce blocks every hour to every minute. How much they get paid? They get roughly 1400 SP per day. Per month they get roughly 42,500 SP and per year they get about 510,000 SP
Here are the top witnesses
Voting
They get voted in by people like us. It's just like an election if you don't vote, other people may vote in witnesses who are malicious or simply unreliable. They are paid to how high they are in the witness ranks. You can vote to approve a witness. When you've decided to vote, go to Steemit's top witnesses page find their account and vote. Your account is limited to approving 30 witness accounts. https://steemd.com/witnesses
Can anyone become a witness?
The answer is: The answer is YES
To become a witness, you require these steps.
- You must have trust from the community
- A powerful and reliable server
- A powerful server with excellent bandwidth to operate Steem
- Creating a signing key then broadcasting your intent to become a witness
- An accurante price feed of Steem to USD which is updated once a day
- You should understand most Steem concepts
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