What is a witness?

No not that...

A witness on steemit is a computer in its simplistic form, the witness nodes to give them their proper title witness or reviews a transaction on the steem blockchain. So what has a transaction got to do with you. The word transaction might be the issue here, typically when we think transaction we think money for services as a transaction or sending money to another bank account as a transaction or purchasing something in a shop as a transaction etc. Here in the Blockchain ecosystem a transaction is everything you do on steemit, busy, Dtube, steepshot etc. Every post you view is called from the blockchain to the site you are viewing it on this is a transaction in this ecosystem. Every post you reseteem, comment on or vote on, these are all transactions. Without witnesses there would be no way to retrieve the data and display it.

What has that got to do with me?

Well, everything really. Without witnesses there is no transportation system for us to use, no way to report information to the blockchain or retrieve it, no way to get post rewards etc. So now you know what a witness does and why it is important that they exist. But did you know that it costs a lot of money to maintain a witness node? At the risk of getting too technical to run a witness node, a proper witness node you need to factor in backups, load balancing, failover, redundancy, minimum spec, bandwidth etc. None of these come cheap, you also have to host the server somewhere that will not fail either, you might have to host 2 servers (redundancy) to ensure that we, the users have a steady and reliable network to post, read, upvote, share and comment on. The requirement on witness node specification has increased recently too, this has caused a double the amount of RAM (random access memory) requirement. This is an ongoing cost increase.

Mo Money, Mo Problems...

Surely the witnesses get paid for all this work, no? Firstly don't call me Surely (badum tish) If you get the gag hit me up with a gif in the comments. Yes, witnesses do get paid for the transactions they verify. But this payment amount and the amount of transactions they witness varies by their position on the Witness board If you are a lower rank, you get paid less and get less blocks to witness. So there in lies an issue. If we are a decentralized network we need to incentivise this decentralization not impede it. Witnesses in the top 20 get a higher rate of pay and higher rate of blocks. Don't get me wrong, I do believe that the witnesses that do the majority of the work should get paid and paid well.

However in this article by @sircork and indeed this article by @ura-soul they have highlighted a couple of issues that need to be addressed. It looks, to the untrained eye, like myself that there is something a foot. There are several dead witnesses still being voted for by whales which is holding them in the witness hierarchy who seem to be providing little by way of witnessing.

So what can be done?

There have been calls to update, modernize and or revoke votes to almost reset the counter so we can remove this "dead wood" from the witness leagues. Should we distribute the blocks across say 100 top witness nodes or 150 nodes? Personally I say yes, why not? Of course the nodes must be up to scratch, they must have the backup, redundancy and load balancing required to be efficient and reliable. If they are not there should be some type of punishment or a way to move them out of a position that holds back other willing witnesses nodes. There should then be a tier of backup witnesses nodes waiting in the wind to come on stream if and when a node goes dead. There should be proper incentive for new witnesses nodes to come on-stream too. If the network is to grow we need to move away from the current model.

There are major roadblocks in the way of steem and indeed steemit because of the ram / server cost requirements for new witnesses. I can not see anyone wanting to pay for the privilege of running a proper witness server. By proper I of course mean, backups, failover, redundancy, minimum spec, bandwidth etc.

This coupled with the "dead wood" on the witness leader board and the lack of desire to update or modernize the witness voting page makes a very difficult if not near impossible task for anyone outside of the top 20. There is some major politics at play at best and collusion at worst in my opinion. It is begining to smell a lot like an "old boys club" IMO.

What can we do now to help this situation?

It will take some time for anything to change from the top, so in the mean time we can do something! Ok so as the majority of people who are reading this are not whales, orcas or even dolphins your votes are worth very little. Mine is too. But what we can do is to support a witness and or witnesses that we believe will help with the evolution and maintenance of this network. Below are a couple of my suggestions. I have made this as easy as possible for people to click and vote for "my guys" and I have included a link that you need to include your own witness choice name to vote on.

In no particular order

If you want to vote directly just use the link below and add in your witness instead of WITNESSNAME

https://steemconnect.com/sign/account_witness_vote?approve=1&witness=WITNESSNAME

There was also a great radio show hosted by @shadowspub on the subject. You can listen to the whole show here. I highly recommend listening in.

All images unless otherwise sourced and noted as such are my own. Sourced images are clickable to show their source. My own images are typically taken with my HTC ONE.

WTF is a witness and why you should give a damm!