The tail of the long, long chain of Steem peasant witnesses, locked out of the 'block every minute' top 20 Oligarchy, yet lucky enough to have processed blocks since I’ve been watching, is much shorter than I'd imagined.
My witness @Chillbill is in the first 4000 witnesses alphabetically (suggesting there could be 20K of them or more) I’ll get around to finding out exactly sometime, but that will be academic.
The question is how many Witnesses in this huge list are operational and how long it takes a Steam peasant who has a live witness to get at leasy a measly single block.
Only 92 unique witnesses have processed a block in the past 36ish hours. So it would seem if there are thousands of Witnesses alive then it might take forever to catch a bone from the high table.
If it doesn’t take that long that would suggest many witnesses are dead and have just given up.
We will see.
Lots of witnesses have sequential names abcd0001, 0002, 0003 etc. suggesting it is heavily botted which is also not a great sign but as we go further down the rabbit hole, what is going on, will become clearer.
We go deeper.
If you want to give me one of your many Witness votes that will be appreciated. So far I’ve got a couple but that’s it.
I don’t purport to know a huge amount about Steem's inner workings, so forgive me my errors but I will persist to post what I experience or see and I’m open to all sorts of input to help me on this journey of discovery.