Witness Voting
Since most of my followers are minnows, such as myself, I thought it would be a good idea if I put together a short post about the importance of selecting, and voting for, witnesses.
The Witnesses, and more specifically the top 20 witnesses, are the folks who effectively steer this little ship we call Steemit. There are countless articles out there on the Witnesses, who they are, and what they do. I will share a couple of those here, but you are advised to do your own search for deep dive info.
@steemitguide - What exactly is a Steem Witness - 9/16/16
@someguy123 - Seriously, What is a Steem Witness - 9/14/16
@someguy123 put's it in relatively simple terms with this definition:
A Steem witness is a person whom operates a witness server (which produces blocks), and publishes a price feed of STEEM/USD to the network.
So witnesses are important yeah? So who are the witnesses, and how did they get there.
The Top 50
Per the following image from Steem Reports, pulled at approximately 3:00pm Eastern Time the following chart shows the top 50 wintesses by voted vests.
There's a lot of interesting colors here. There are two important colors to keep in mind as we go through this post. The dark blue at the left of most (say right about 30?) of the top 50, and the light blue at the right. Those two blocks happen to belong to @freedom for the former, and "everybody else" for the latter.
As we move on, and borrow some research from @paulag, keep in mind that the @freedom votes are controlled (proxied by) @pumpkin. So when her chart refers to @pumpkin, think @freedom.
The following image comes from Pauala's post about Witness Controlling Power. The post itself goes in to a lot of detail about how many accounts would have to band together in order to be able to control 51% of the voting interest in STEEM.
Reading between the lines, Paula's point may be that STEEM is not as decentralized as we would all like to pretend it is. Fortunately, the 22 accounts she came up with to control 51% of the Witness vests do not band together, otherwise a post encouraging you to vote for witnesses would be misguided.
Here is why it isn't misguided, to borrow another image from Paula's post:
If you have not voted for witnesses, or have not used all 30 of your votes, you are part of that 267 billion unused vests. A huge chunk of that unused is due to the fact that @steemit, and @ned do not vote for witnesses. But there is still a huge chunk of voting vests just going unused.
Do you want to see the power of minnows?
Let's take a look at those unused vests.
- 267.17 unused total
- 146.32 subtract vests held by @steemit
- 7.34 subtract vests held by @ned
- 113.51 billion vests unvoted held by others.
So looking back at the above chart from Paula, 122.61billion vests are currently used to vote for witnesses. 113.51 billion vests not directly controlled by @steemit or @ned are out there waiting to be used. That's damn close to all square.
If you don't vote for witnesses, or do not use all 30 of your votes (I'm guilty of this one) then you are included in that 113 billion vests.
But if you start voting for witnesses, that light blue bar gets bigger. The more often the light blue bar is bigger than the dark blue bar, the more "We The People" are choosing our own witnesses instead of allowing them to be chosen for us.
Currently, the people have managed to put 5 witnesses into the top twenty without @freedom's vote. And with some effort, more could be added to the list.
Wait... Are you saying @freedom is bad?
No! That is not the intent of this post at all. I vote for several of the same witnesses that are voted for by @freedom. Through @pumpkin as a proxy, the @freedom votes are continuously monitored and changed, You can check out the vote history here @pumpkin steemd stats. One thing we can say about this account is that it does maintain it's votes.
What I am saying is that decentralization is good. So the more of us who utilize out votes, the less power is left in the hands of a few people, and the smaller that dark blue bar gets. It will always be influential, but the "other voters" bar could dominate the top 20 if we put the effort in.
Okay, I'm convinced, how do I vote?
There are two ways to take advantage of your voting power. You can go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses and input your votes (up to 30) in one by one. The current top 50 are listed, but you can vote for anyone with your witness votes. If there is someone you know is running a witness server who is not in the top 50, just type their name in the space provided under the Top 50, and your vote will be tallied. You can help push some smaller witnesses into the top 50.
If you do not have the time or inclination to study the witnesses and what they are doing, you can name someone else to proxy vote your shares. Honestly, I think this is where most of us minnows should be. There are just too many witnesses to keep up with, and you could feel the need to change your witness votes daily as one witness goes inactive and another jumps up and gets your attention.
To Select a proxy, just go in to that same part of the steemit site: https://steemit.com/~witnesses and scroll down to the bottom where you will see the area to type in the person you want to proxy for your votes.
This can be absolutely any user on the platform. Pick someone you trust, and someone you know is actively voting their witness votes. If you know, and trust, @pumpkin, name @pumpkin your proxy! It is your choice. But do choose to use your votes. That's my ask.... let's bump up the number of voted vests on this platform as much as we can.
For the record, as of 11/27/17 here are the witnesses I am currently supporting. If you agree with this list, feel free to take ten seconds and set me as a proxy, although I don't advise myself as the best proxy in the world. I'm just better than not voting at all.
@aggroed
@anyx
@ausbitbank
@blocktrades
@blueorgy
@curie
@drakos
@good-karma
@gtg
@jesta
@lukestokes.mhth
@netuoso
@patrice
@pharesim
@reggaemuffin
@roelandp
@sircork
@someguy123
@steemgigs
@swelker101
@teamsteem
@thecryptodrive
@themarkymark
@timcliff
@utopian-io
Thanks for taking the time to check out this post. It will take you less time to vote for witnesses than it did to read this post, I promise!