In my every witness update post, I got one question as comment i.e. What is a witness and What is an active and inactive witness. I am kinda lazy person So here is my answer for all.
What is A Witness
Steem Witness is a person/team who run a server that contains the steem blockchain. Witnesses produce blocks. So it's like the miner of bitcoin but with a twist as Steem Blockchain use DPOS consensus mechanism.
What are They Suppose to do
It is a witness responsibility to make sure that the steem blockchain will continue to run smoothly and in a distributed manner.
A witness provides price feed updates for the market and internal conversion from SBD to Steem (3 days Mean), i.e the STEEM to USD and process the blocks, mean validating post, votes, resteem and other life cycles of the blockchain. Like in Bitcoin miners are validating the transactions.
They play the role of consensus i.e. Decide to run or not run the version of steem blockchain
A hard fork happens when 67% of the top witnesses are all running a certain version of STEEM, which means the top 19 witnesses can pick and choose whether to agree with a fork or not. (e.g. Hard Fork 13 and 14 were both postponed for a week, and re-designed because witnesses refused to update)
Active and Inactive Witness
The witnessed who does the above are active mean, Running the latest version of steem blockchain (Currently 19.2), Continuously update the price feed.
Like You can see I and other witness are doing there job correctly. So we are active witnesses.
And those witnesses are not doing above job like, Not updating the price feed, not run the latest blockchain version or both are Inactive witnesses. See below witness like 
See here top 100 witnesses or Check the full list with all witness details Here provided by
Any steemian can be a witness, To become a Steem Witness an individual needs to be approved and voted by the Community and must have to run a witness server.So indeed, A witness should do some good works for the steem community and must be liked by others to get approved as a witness from other users.
What Benefit a Witness Got for his work
The top 20 witnesses get 1 block each, per 21 blocks around. This means they get approximately 1 block per 63 seconds..
The backup witness, Witness rank after 20 like me get block according to Delegated Vest. Mean Accumulated SP of all the user voted me as a witness.
As now in 88th rank with 3000 M vest, I get 1 block per 6:40 hours.
If you want to set up a witness server, I could help you, just message on steemt.chat or on Discord @ jatinhota#0025
How to Decide Who to Vote For
Like Post payout in witness also The user who has more SP (Vests) has more voting weight as well. Like 
So Before you approve/ cast a witness vote, know them first, their server details as it is the most needed thing to run blockchain smoothly, dedication to the community, projects and long-term commitment to the steem.
If you have awesome ideas that will help our community to grow then let me know in steemit.chat or join #teamIndia server in discord https://discord.gg/H5wHbt8.
Vote for me as a witness
You can vote for me here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Go to the witness page https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Scroll down and Type "jatinhota" into the box (without the quotes and @), and then click the vote button:
If I am on the top 50 witnesses you'll be able to vote for me simple my clicking upvote symbol the beside jatinhota.
Have An Idea? Want to Chat with me or Need Support? You can Directly Chat with me in Steemit.chat or Discord
Thank you for reading it.
This post was written on the new
platform, come check it out.