Introduction to Steem witnesses all what you need to know about witnesses.

Introduction

Most steemit user have little or no knowledge in what is called steem witness and that not good enough that why I want to use this medium to educate us on who steem withness are, what they do and how to vote them.

Sources

Who are steem witnesses?

Steem blockchain uses a consensus mechanism know as Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS). Been a decentralized social media, blocks are required to be continuously created by people after the current block is filled. So the people in charge of creating this blocks are called steem witnesses.

Steem witnesses play an important role on steemit blockchain and they are selected through vote (election). Each steemit user has the right to vote up to 30 witnesses. Although these votes is weight by the stake of the steemit user, so it is possible to sort these witnesses based on number of vote. The witness with the highest number of vote is chosen first and he/she will be able to create and add new blocks to the blockchain.

The top 20 witnesses with the highest number of vote are selected and they will work as a full time block miners, which means producing block every 63 second. The 21th position witness will act as a backup witness. Witnesses are paid in steem power (SP) for their effort in ensuring the platform continuity. Witnesses are also paid based on their rank and also number of blocks allowed is produce is also base on rank.

How to vote for witnesses on steemit

To vote of witnesses is very easy and I will explain the step by step procedure below.

-Step 1: Click on the option icon in the top right of steemit homepage

-Step 2: Click on vote for witnesses

-Step 3: After clicking on vote for witnesses, a new page will appear with an instruction saying you can only vote for 30 witnesses.

-Step 4: To vote for any witnesses, click on the arrow bottom pointing upward. As seen in the picture below, I have vote all witnesses ticked green.

Why should we vote for witnesses?

Witnesses create blocks and blocks are where all transaction/ post / comments are stored on steemit platform. With the share number of millions of users posting, commenting and powering up every second, a block will easily get filled under a minute. So for this reason we need at least 20 witness to keep producing blocks so we can keep on with our daily activities on steemit.

Conclusion

With this brief explanation I hope this will help many users who does not know much about steem witnesses to have a better understanding and see reason why they need to vote for witnesses because it important they keep producing blocks so we can keep steeming.

Thank you all for reading see you very soon.

Cc. @kiwiscanfly

NOTE: All unsourced pictures are taken from my phone and 10% Author Reward goes to the community account.