Hi Bernie. In general, I agree with the assessment that most of the top witnesses should be doing more. If we had all 20 top witnesses doing as much as @jesta, we would probably have a lot different marketcap.

There are a few in your list that I think are actually adding more value than what you have here, but I will leave it up to those individuals to defend themselves if they think it is necessary. (I do agree with more of your comments than I disagree with though..)

For myself, I do feel like I do a lot for the platform (I do run a full node, I am the moderator of the help channel of steem chat, I submit pull requests to condenser, faucet, and devportal repositories, etc.), but even with all of that, I never feel like I am doing enough.

Witnesses get paid a lot, but it is not a “stable/dependable” source of income. As a top witness, I could be voted out at any time, and there are factors that influence the STEEM price that are out of my control. Because of the “instability”, even though I am a top witness, I still hold a “real” job to be able to support my family. This is really unfortunate because after my full time job and a small amount of time to spend with my family each week, I only have a limited amount of time left in the week to spend on Steem. I really do try to do as much as I possibly can in the time I have, but IMO it still never seems like enough.

I know you will probably say that my “personal” life is really my problem to figure out, and for the amount of money involved I should find a way to “make it work” - which I do agree with. I had actually never even really considered that becoming a top witness was even a possibility when I started my campaign, but now that I am actually here (which I consider a huge honor), getting to a point where I can actually do this full time (without putting my family at severe risk) so that I can contribute more is a high priority of mine. I hope to get to that point very soon.

Having witnesses contribute to the blockchain is probably going to be one of the more difficult things to achieve. I agree that having more people (other than Steemit) making changes is something we really need to accomplish. The amount of people qualified to do that though (without breaking things) is probably quite small. Even for myself - I have a software development background, so I think it is something that I am technically capable of, but it would still be a significant challenge for me to actually develop something complicated by myself. Also, right now testing changes is a really big hurdle. Even if I were to develop a change to make a hardfork, I honestly don’t know how I would go about setting up an environment to be able to make sure it works before deploying it to the live network - which is 100% necessary in order for the change to be ‘safe’. I could submit a PR and rely on Steemit to test before merging, but for obvious reasons - this seems to be missing the whole point. I’ve talked to Vandeberg/Steemit about this, and they are working on putting together a test net. Once this is done, it will at least lower the barrier to entry for capable developers to work on changes. It would be great if 2018 could be the year we have our first community hardfork.

The real solution to the problem of underperforming witnesses though (IMO) is competition. When I started there were quite a few in the top 19 that I was pretty convinced were doing absolutely nothing. Since that time, people like @jesta, @netuoso, @followbtcnews, @aggroed, and myself have taken their place. You may still say that many of the ones that are still there (and even the new ones that have taken their places) are still doing very little compared to what they should be - but in my view that is just opportunity for someone who can contribute more to come along and push them out. I really would love to see more people come along and shake things up to create more competition for the top spots. It is definitely not easy to make it into a top position, and requires more than just “working hard”, but if someone comes along and starts adding significantly more value than the ones that are currently there - the stakeholders do seem to notice.