A Full Steemit User's Guide to Steem Witnesses
View this post on Hive: A Full Steemit User's Guide to Steem Witnesses
Sun Yuchen is a liar, thief, charlatan, and all around cunt. But I don't need to tell you that. Find me at Hive, where we are glad to be rid of him and all of his fake followers, sockpuppets, and thieves.
Thanks, this post is very helpful.
HOWEVER, what I am missing here, is how transactions on the blockchain are handled, who handles them and how many nodes are involved in keeping the blockchain online in the world at any given time. (Node list online? I see Seed Nodes, but not sure if that's just the top few nodes)
I see articles that say 25,000 ETH nodes are active, compared to BTC 7000+ and I wonder, how does that compare with STEEM and how will that look in the future, assuming Fabric is launched, etc.
Hi,
I'm really happy to get such a good guidline from your post.Thank you
Transactions from Steemit are signed by the browser locally, sent to Steemit's servers, forwarded to their node, and then are broadcast to the peers their nodes are connected to. Each Steem node (seed nodes, witness nodes, API nodes, any node) is broadcasting the transactions it sees and also sharing node addresses with other nodes. The witness nodes get the transactions, verify they are legitimate (like other nodes have checked), and include them into a block when the account they are configured to generate from are scheduled to generate a block.
As for node count, I don't know. If I had to guess I'd say at least 100. More is obviously better and more robust.
So in a nutshell, Witnesses are like Bitcoin miners but are elected and seem to have more responsibility.
Did I get this right? :)
'The Steem blockchain produces blocks in 63-second rounds: 21 blocks per round at a target of 3 seconds between blocks'
'and of course running their node by getting powered up by 1 STEEM for each block they produce.'
Does this mean the top 19 witnesses (and backup) get 1 STEEM a minute?
Thanks!
The witness pay was changed in December 2016 for full time witnesses to less than 20% of that. For a top-20 witness, it's currently something like 0.18 SP/block generated and falling. For a backup witness, it's something like 0.9 SP/block and falling.
Great. Thanks for the information. Just too late to make it to my blog on Witnesses, but good to know none the less. Being honest, i couldn't work out if (on the old pay scale), if the top 19 were being paid 1 Steem every minute, but the top 19 would change every minute, meaning the same 19 weren't being paid every minute? uhh, ya, think that makes sense?!
Hey @pfunk I am new user of Steemit how can I set my linux server for steem witness to claim steem on every block, sir if possible send me the link and the complete infotmation of the setup .
Thank you
@oodeyaa
I have a question about witness voting.
Is there a difference between voting for 30 people and voting for 1 person?
For example, I have 30 SPs. If I vote for 1 person, will it send 30sp power to 1 person? If I vote for 30 people, will the power delivered to 1 witness be 1sp? Or does 30 people have all 30sp of power delivered?
Is there a relationship between witness voting and personal voting power?
In other words, when witness voting, does the person's voting power be consumed like a regular voting?
Is there a limit to the duration of witness voting?
Will it remain indefinitely until I make a change?
Thanks for your questions!
There is no difference in the witness voting strength between voting for one person vs 30. Each account that receives a witness vote from you will receive your full SP on their vote tally.
There is no cost to voting power.
Votes remain until they are changed by the user.
Hi, there is one thing missing - hardforks. Do you know how exactly it works on Steem? Plus do you still update document with witnesses and their opinions of hardforks? If so, could you share a link to that?
Thanks, and you're right. Back when this post was originally written, hard forks were less of an issue as the features being added or changed were less consequential.
It takes a supermajority consensus of witnesses for a successful, smooth fork of Steem. Usually the new hard forks are set to activate when 17/21 witnesses in a round are running its version.
I only documented witness opinions regarding hard forks a couple times when there was a final set of consensus changes presented.
Added to Awesome Steem
Thanks pfunk, I feel like I understand the whole witness thing a lot better now, just a couple of clarification questions.
So is the Steem blockchain different from the Bitcoin blockchain; I thought a block took years to produce; or am I confusing terminology?
Is the entire blockchain spread over just 19 accounts; I thought it was meant to be hundreds? Will that be the case in the future?
Are they setting the price or just feeding back from other sources? If they are, how do they decide on price?
How do you do that?
Thanks
CG
Bitcoin and Steem use different consensus mechanisms. Bitcoin uses proof-of-work only, and the network retargets difficulty once every two weeks to keep the time between blocks to 10 minutes, on average. A lot has changed since Bitcoin was released in 2009. Newer consensus methods have been developed that aren't so computationally expensive and allow very fast block times. DPOS is one of these. I don't come from the Bitshares sphere like many here, but Steem builds upon Dan's work on Bitshares to make it super fast, and that's how 3 second block times are possible. It also comes in handy making Steemit update in almost real time :)
The primary block producers are the the top 19 approved accounts, but backup witnesses and miners also produce 1 block per round each. This allows some more diversity in block producers and rewards good witnesses that just don't have enough votes who would otherwise shut down their node for lack of any compensation. Keep in mind the top 19 witness list can and does change with people voting. Miners having a block per round gives another route of access to producing blocks, if you've got the CPU power to use.
It's a feed from STEEM market price. STEEM tokens are currently traded on Bittrex and BitShares' OpenLedger. Multiply the market price in bitcoin by bitcoin USD value and you get Steem USD value. A command is then given to the Steem node and the witness' price feed is broadcast to the network.
This is a little tricky for a casual user I suppose. Keep up with Steem releases and know when a hard fork will occur. You can view the latest release and changelogs here, although presently 0.8.4 is only a contender for an upcoming hard fork and which curation strategy prevails is still not set in stone.
Why the price feed from each witness differ?
Can they tweak the price from what their algos are announcing them about the price feed?
What is the interval at which they can change what their price feed announce?
Is the algo which provides witnesses with price feed part of the steem witness client/software?
Really interesting!
Each witness generally will use different sources and settings and intervals to update their price feed. They can set any price they want, although now there will be more scrutiny on accurate reporting. Any automation of price feeds is done outside of the steemd software, although the command is fed to it. The command looks like this when using cli_wallet, if you are curious:
publish_feed "pfunk" { "base":"0.225 SBD", "quote":"1.000 STEEM"} trueI really appreciated you answer. One day I plan on setting a witness up.
Today morning, I found a bug in steemit.com Please check it and fix it soon: https://steemit.com/steem/@tadakaluri/share-button-is-not-working-under-each-article
I have plenty of Linux server and mining experience (mostly alt coin ASIC mining). Is there still a need for new witnesses?
The door's open if you'd like to do it. Visit the #witness channel on steem.chat
Thanks @pfunk I am on it. BTW I built a 12 core/24GB server running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to play with. From what I am seeing I would need to rent a VPS. I will take it to steem.chat #witness. -- Thanks again.
The CPU cores aren't all that important but RAM is. You can get it to work well enough if you use an SSD as swap (240GB+ disk space recommended).
all cool but i still dnt understand it ..is there anyone who could explain it to in a simple words :),please
This has been the most comprehensive yet simple take on witnesses... You got a complete newbie like me onboard.