How to Vote for a Witness Outside the Top 50, and What NOT TO DO!

I have noticed some peculiar behaviour. This is a topic that has been written about many, many times, but I've just noticed something that makes me think that some people have not fully understood the process; and especially what NOT to do at the end.

What's in a Vote?

Firstly, a quick overview. On the Steem blockchain, the witnesses process every block created by every transaction, such as posting this article, your upvote, your comment etc. On most blockchains, this processing is done by "miners" and anybody, given the hardware and software, can mine most blockchains.

However, Steem (and hence Steemit) uses a concept known as Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS); this means that the witnesses are not external miners but have been elected from, and by, the stakeholders - that's you and me and every other holder of SP. Your vote is worth the value of Vests in your account; the higher your Vests, the stronger your witness voting strength. You can check how many Vests you are worth by going to https://steemd.com/@yourusername. Vests and SP are proportional to each other, but the conversion between the two changes as the Steem ecosystem changes. So once you vote for a witness, as your account SP increases so does your Vests and so does the importance of your vote.

Your vote is not a static thing, such as with a one-user one-vote system, it is a dynamic thing that increases in value as your account increases in SP. This means that votes from newbies and minnows are important because as your account grows, so does your influence on who are the top witnesses. Indeed, a witness may well move up a little on the ladder of witnesses without any new votes but merely on the existing votes increasing in value.

How to Vote?

Having described the concept of stakeholder voting on Steemit, how do you actually go about voting for your favourite witnesses? Firstly, head over to the Witness page; you can always access this from your dropdown menu on the top-right of your screen and click Vote for Witnesses.

There you will see an ordered list of the current top 50 witnesses. However, there are also at least another 100 witnesses below that top 50 who need your vote. How do you know they exist? Well, you will come across many of them by reading their posts or interacting with them in the chatrooms. If they have been helpful to you and given you sound advice, then consider voting for them. You have up to 30 witnesses that you can vote for, so you have plenty of votes to give out.

Now, voting for a witness in the top 50 is easy: just click on the upvote button next to their name. You will also get a pop-up asking you to verify your vote using one of your keys.

But how do you vote for someone outside the top 50 when you can't see their name? This is when you have to scroll down to just below the 50th witness and you will see a text input box. Type in the name of your chosen witness and click Vote. Then, as always, you will need to verify your vote using one of your keys.

Then, if the username exists as a witness account, you will see that name appear below the text box with a blue upvote button. At this point DO NOT CLICK THAT BLUE BUTTON! If you do that, you are unvoting your vote, essentially cancelling the vote you've just made!

This is the key step I wanted to get to; because you have just voted and entered your key, your "voting session" is still active and you are one click away from undoing your vote. Just leave it well alone, your task as a good Steemian has been done and (unless you wish to cast another vote) walk away from that page!

If you ever do wish to unvote a witness (such as an inactive dead witness) you can click that blue vote button, but this time you will be asked for a key to verify your choice. I think the danger in unvoting a fresh new vote is because no new verification key is requested.

The reason for writing this is because I have seen this happen in my own witness account: people have voted, then accidentally unvoted and then come back to vote again! I then had a look at a few other witness accounts and could see dozens of similar things happening. Hence, it seems like a common mistake and therefore the reason for this article. Hope this has helped clarify both the process... and when to stop!

Now, please vote for my new witness account - you may read my introduction (part 1), with part 2 coming very soon as my server is now up and running!

And please don't unvote it 5 seconds later!

Creator of the Minnows Accelerator Project