Your Witness Vote May Not Count!

Did you know that your witness vote may not count?

I don't know how I never took the trouble to figure this out sooner. I knew it was an issue, but...I dunno. I guess it was not a priority for me. Well, now it is. I'm going to be interviewing some top witnesses on my DEAR LITTLESCRIBE show each week, and I need to be prepared.

Here's the deal, there are currently 400 witnesses on the platform. You heard me. Four Hundred.

I know. I'm as surprised as you are!

But...that doesn't make sense. When I go to vote, only 50 of them are listed. And even steemd.com only lists 100 of them. What gives?

I know. It's a good question. What gives? Why doesn't the voting page show more witnesses? Shouldn't we know who all 400 witnesses are? Better yet, shouldn't we know who all the ACTIVE witnesses are? Why are disabled witnesses even on the list? Will someone eventually clean up the witness voting page? Or is something else at play? Dun Dun Dunnnnn!!!

As Hive account@drakos (witness #24) puts it:

This can mislead users in their voting, which still happens. As an example, Hive account@arhag decided to stop witnessing few weeks ago, after a long and solid history of witnessing. Unfortunately, he didn't make any official announcement about it in his blog, so people are still mistakenly voting for him because he's listed in the top 50!

You May Be Voting for Air

According to Hive account@drakos, we may likely be making the mistake of voting for no one. Meaning, of the 400 declared witnesses, only 133 of them are actually active witnesses. And of the top 100, a full 19 of them are either inactive or disabled! That's 1/5 of the witnesses listed on steemd.com. So guess what? You may be voting for a null witness! Seriously, have you checked your vote lately?

The criteria Hive account@drakos used for determining witness viability is as follows:

• Node must be running Hard Fork 19 (witnesses are not scheduled to produce blocks unless they are running HF19)
• New witnesses will not be considered active until they generate their first block
• Block signing key needs to be active
• Must not have disabled their node (or deactivated themselves voluntarily)

Top 3 Witness Lists Visited

• steemit: lists the top 50 witnesses, including inactive and disabled ones, but not indicating who they are.
• steemd.com: lists the top 100, also including inactive and disabled ones, but not indicating who they are.
• stemian.info: put out by Hive account@drakos, shows all 400 witnesses, AND shows who is active and who isn't, plus everything else the other two provide (such as bio page, price feed, etc.).

Hive account@drakos goes a little more into depth in his post from 8 months ago here

The Mystery

So in my experience -- and maybe I'm just daft -- but in my experience, when Steemit Inc. comes across a new development that works better for the blockchain, they tend to adopt it as their own. At least...they used to. Take Hive account@blocktrades for example. Their crypto exchange helps us trade steem on the open crypto market. It used to be a separate app. Now it's automatically part of any sell or buy exchange transaction. And steem.chat used to be a completely outside development. Now it's incorporated into the actual menu on steemit. And you know the Welcome page and the FAQs? These used to be a separate site. Now it's on the main menu for every noob to see. Someone proposed and developed the code for a "resteem" feature. Now it's part of the blog features. The list goes on and on.

So Hive account@drakos has reorganized the witness list to include ALL witnesses: active, inactive, disabled, etc. He did this almost a year ago. He is a well known witness. He has brought this issue up. So have others. Has steemit adopted his list? Nope. Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Well, now that you know who your witnesses are, doesn't it make you feel like your vote counts?

Me neither. But we can pretend, right?