For those who are unfamiliar, witnesses are the computers in the Steem network whose job it is to make 'blocks' and add them to the blockchain and also to store the complete blockchain data. These blocks contain information about posts, comments, votes and currency transfers.
To pay for the running of this computer network, the Witnesses (well, the people who run them) share 15% of the Steem reward pool, whilst the rest goes to Authors and Curators. Most this goes to the top 20 witnesses, as they produce the vast majority of the blocks.
Who become the top witnesses is decided by an ongoing election process where all Steem accounts can vote for up to 30 witnesses. The more SP (Vested Steem Power) each voting account has, the greater its influence on the election outcome.
Using the link below, you can choose either the individual witnesses you'd like to vote for, or choose a proxy, which then makes your votes the same as the account you nominate.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
The witnesses are the custodians of the blockchain, and have a very important role.
I've been doing some research on the witness voting, and thought I'd make a graph showing the top 50 witnesses (by calculated value), and how many of their votes come from Direct (normal) voting, and how many come from Proxy votes. The top 20 witness are shown slightly darker in the graph.
Disclaimer: Though it's very similar, these votes don't exactly match the order on the vote page above, and I'm not sure why this is. I calculated the value as the sum of vesting_shares going to each witness. If anyone has any ideas of why this isn't precisely the same, I'd be interested to hear from you.
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