What is a witness? Who should I vote for, to witness? Let's move some witnesses up into the top 20!!!

This is dedicated to @haejin's three thousand new followers this past week. And to the witness I interacted with yesterday. And, upon re-reading, to Christopher Walken's performance in "the watch scene" in Pulp Fiction.

What is a Witness?

A witness is a computer owned by a Steemit account holder which "mines" STEEM. The STEEM blockchain has 20 "Primary" witnesses who create it, "mining" a block every three seconds (which they sometimes miss). There are hundreds others who are also assisting, as "Backup" witnesses. If one of the top 20 goes offline, or misses too many blocks, it can be replaced by a Backup witnesses.

The top 20 witnesses earn a significantly greater amount than the others do. Moving from #20 to #21 involves a dramatic decrease in income. Might not even pay for the server any longer.

Jerry Banfield is Love

@jerrybanfield has some great articles about witnesses; identifying them, sharing where they're coming from, etc. I learned a lot from reading his articles. He is a witness, and I encourage you to vote for him. Here's the first article of his I read here, which goes into the numbers. Basically (and, back in August when he wrote it), the top 20 earn $300/day or so on average, and #21 earns $100 and it goes down from there.

You can vote for a witness by going to this page: https://steemit.com/~witnesses. It lists the top 50 witnesses, and if the one you want to vote for isn't found there, there's a text box at the bottom (scroll way down) where you can enter a witness name.

My Votes

Currently, I'm voting for the following in the top 50:
@blocktrades
@good-karma
@someguy123
@aggroed
@jerrybanfield
@teamsteem

I've also entered the following manually:
@reggaemuffin
@guiltyparties
@steemitboard
@yehey
@steemgigs
@arcange

In addition, there's a text field at the bottom of the page if you'd like to allow someone else to vote for the witnesses for you, in the "Set Proxy" location. For instance, @jerrybanfield does some great work for the community, advertising on Facebook and Google to get more users over to Steemit, so I've voted for him as a witness and have considered setting him as my proxy. Haven't done that yet though.

Here Comes the Watch

Recently, a witness that I was voting for decided to make an attack post, mocking @haejin's analysis and style. I removed my witness vote and let him know, and was subsequently attacked for it -- he dug into my Wallet page, posted a screencap of it, and accused me of "begging" @haejin. I responded with what actually happened, and then he mocked my concussion symptoms and implied that I was a woman. Thus, confirming my suspicion that he is not someone I want representing me as a witness.

It was nice to see my good friend @fishyculture was defending me there, as well.

When I first removed my witness vote, I noticed that he was at position #18. Then a little bit later, he was at #19. Today, I see he's back at #18.

However, there seems to be very little difference between #18, 19, 20, and 21. It's difficult to see in the tiny image, so I'll describe it: @netuoso is #18 with 50.9q votes, @thecryptodrive is #19 with 50.8q votes, @pfunk is #20 with 50.8q votes as well, and @wackou is #21 with 50.7q votes.

I wondered yesterday, and mentioned in a few comments -- should I start a campaign to try to remove @netuoso's witness votes? This presents a challenge, though -- @haejin's three thousand new followers in the last week likely haven't even voted for a single witness (and probably don't know to). So they haven't already voted for him as a witness, and thus, cannot remove their votes.

But then from looking at the above table (which you can find here), I realized that if we just move a couple witnesses up into the top 20, @netuoso would drop down.

Also, I don't know what "50.9q votes" means -- is it "quadrillion"? I know that there are much larger numbers in the inner workings of STEEM and Steemit but I haven't dug into there. Looking...

Okay, found it! Did so by poking around in one of the tools I just posted about for @haejin's new users! It was in https://steemd.com/@netuoso -- scroll down, watching the left sidebar, and you'll get to a section "Witness". Under this it has an entry for "votes" which is currently "50,918,452,610,881,948" -- which is 50.9 quadrillion.

Now, I need to research how many "votes" a witness gets when someone votes. It probably has to do with STEEM Power... Yes, I think I see it -- looking at my user page, at https://steemd.com/@libertyteeth, I see at the top right that I have "90M vests" (that should keep me warm! :) ). And, I have about 44k SP. So every SP represents around 2,000 vests.

Now I'll do a test. I'll load @jerrybanfield's page at SteemD, grab the "votes", remove my witness vote, refresh his page and grab the "votes" again, and then vote for him as a witness again (and verify the increase as well).

When	Votes
Before	47,922,595,697,030,613
Removed	47,832,724,006,136,677
Difference	89,871,690,893,936
Re-added	47,922,678,794,727,575

So, the difference appears to be about 90 trillion. That's from my 90 million "vests", which are from my 44k SP. So, for approximately every 500 SP someone has, it would increase or decrease the witness "votes" number by about a trillion, or one thousandth of a quadrillion.

Okay, now how far do we need to move the others? Let's get some exact numbers. Also, after getting the numbers I'll vote for #19, #20, and #21 and record that figure as well:

Position	Witness	Votes	Exact Votes	After My Witness Vote
18	@netuoso	50.9q	50,930,003,643,375,985	n/a
19	@thecryptodrive	50.8q	50,835,960,936,004,070	50,925,944,889,623,073
20	@pfunk	50.8q	50,758,128,109,032,949	50,848,238,897,856,603
21	@wackou	50.7q	50,665,769,126,687,291	50,755,747,947,447,008

Okay, now we can do some simple math.

To move #19 to be in #18, we need 50,930,003,643,375,985 - 50,925,944,889,623,073 = 4,058,753,752,912 more votes, or about 2k SP.

Then, to move #20 to be in #19, we need 50,930,003,643,375,985 - 50,848,238,897,856,603 = 81,764,745,519,382 more votes, or about 40k SP.

Finally, to move #21 to be in #20, we need 50,930,003,643,375,985 - 50,755,747,947,447,008 = 174,255,695,928,977 more votes, or about 87k SP.

 

This might be more than the new three thousand followers can do. However, that one whale who was upvoting @haejin and started the controversy over "reward pool rape" (an undefined, non-technical weasel-word term) might be able to do it single-handedly. That was @ranchorelaxo.

I mean, look at what I managed to do, with my vote changes in the above table -- I almost got #19 up to #18 by myself. Oh, and I'll have my wife @countrylover vote as well, even though she doesn't have quite enough (she's got 2.5M vests (or 1,258 SP), so would move #19 a little over half the remaining distance).

Thanks for your support while I've been attacked. Now? "My turn." :)

Enjoy!

---