Okay so this is one of the most challenging subjects new users have been struggling with grasping. I want to dive in momentarily, but first I'll drop a few explainatory videos and other guides I've used to learn to credit their hard work and give you other sources and different media formats to share on.

Guides

• https://steemit.com/witness-category/@timcliff/witness-voting-guide by @timcliff
• https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitguide/steemitguide-what-is-a-exactly-is-a-steem-witness-and-why-every-user-should-vote by @steemitguide
• https://steemit.com/witness-category/@someguy123/seriously-what-is-a-witness-why-should-i-care-how-do-i-become-one-answer by @someguy123
• https://steemit.com/steemit-guides/@pfunk/a-full-steemit-user-s-guide-to-steem-witnesses by @pfunk
• Lastly check out this questionaire that @cryptofiend wrote up for Steemit witnesses to fill out as a way for them to work with the community on their transparency - https://steemit.com/steemit/@thecryptofiend/witness-questionnaire-a-solution-for-voter-confusion by @thecryptofiend
• If you are looking to become a witness, here is a guide: https://steemit.com/steemhelp/@steemed/become-a-steem-witness-essentials by @steemed

Video Explainations

Simple Overview

Steem witnesses are essentially a vote-based political system that enables certain users to have a major influence on how Steemit will progress in terms of updates on the blockchain (hardforks) the value of Steemit to SBD (price feed), the value given to a new registered user to afford them to get started, they are the main producer of blocks for the blockchain, and have a major impact on community projects and Steemit social platforms. It is a delegated proof of stake (DPOS) system which is explained in the video above.

Some things to be clear:

• technically anyone can be a witness, but you generally need to meet some requirements for people to actual support you (which you'll need)
• witnesses are for the Steem blockchain, not Steemit, but through Steemit we can vote and do everything we need to do related to the process
• you can delegate your vote to a proxy
• you should care because if you are not voting nor having someone proxy vote for you, other people could be voting in malicious representation for Steem
• you have 30 votes which you can change at any given time

Steemd Witnesses

You can view a list of the current top 100 witnesses here: https://steemd.com/witnesses. Some are not actually active but still have their votes thus remain in the top 100. The main people with power are the top 19 and 2 others from the pool of 100. One is a backup witness and one is a miner only witness.

I will not be diving into extremely technical explanations as always, my audience is generally minnows or people trying to learn the basics and get an understanding!

Vote For Witnesses at https://steemit.com/~witnesses

You get 30 votes and you can see how many you have left. You can also see the witness thread for each witness which is like their whitepaper for what their goals are / what they are supporting and or working on.

At the bottom you can see who you have voted for and if you want to change your vote. You can also set a proxy so someone else can vote on your behalf! I intend to one day become a witness, but for now if you don't want to get super involved in all the politics and keeping up with different witnesses then you can always set me as your proxy! I will start adding that to my signature in case people want to do that.

In the future I will share updates on witnesses and who I feel should receive votes etc.

Steem Witnesses Further Explained

Quick picture-less concise explanations below cover the major topics of witnesses. I am resharing the table from https://steemd.com/witnesses so you can refer to it with these explanations

Voting

Everyone gets 30 votes per account to give out and or take back at any time via https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Proxy

Proxying your vote is pretty simple you just go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses navigate to the bottom and type in a username here:

I have started to take an active interest in Steem witnesses treating them as future global decentralized politics. If you don't want to learn or bother to stay up to date with it, but do not want your vote wasted then you can make me your proxy to vote on your behalf!

Registration

In the table you can see the different registration fees given by each witness

STEEM Price Feed

In the table you can see the feed. They update their value for STEEM every day to influence the price and the rate of how it converts STEEM to SBD. This information is displayed with the other major indicators here: https://steemd.com/witnesses

Hardfork Influence

They control what version of STEEM we are on and add policies when they commit to a hardfork in the blockchain. This is crucial as they basically set future "legislation or policies" to be enforced on the STEEM blockchain.

SBD Interest Rate

They have influence over the rate at which you earn SBD in your savings and power.

There is a lot that they do outside of their assigned duties, but it's important to vote and participate in order to do our part to ensure the platform stays quality as part of our responsibility in the free decentralized network that is STEEM.

Leave a comment for what you think about all this and if you're going to vote, if you have already, or if you'll make your proxy. Also given that I'm out here trying to help minnows on a daily let me know if you would consider voting for me as a witness (to start gauging support) I currently work with @DTube and @Steepshot and am looking to expand to help other projects and I think as a witness I could majorly influence helping more platforms build and grow on the Steemit. This is all very ambitious and far into the future. I realize that Steemit and Steem are not the same and most of my content is for Steemit, but I believe that the Steemit witnesses should be more for the people since some are inactive or don't do much on Steemit.

I also have a general question to pose.... as far as I know, every account gets 30 votes, so what stops anyone from making many accounts and voting for themself as a witness?

Every time I post I select 1 random winner from the upvotes, resteems, and comments totaling 3 winners and give them 0.01 SBD each and announce it on the next post! I also send out 0.001 weekly to followers! I use https://snackaholic.github.io/steemfortune/en/ by @snackaholic

The winners from the last post I made here:

Were:
@misinaelizaveta
@mytechtrail
@businesswri

Note that once I’ve posted a new post the contest is over and this could be subject to any amount of time up to but not longer than 7 days

http://steepshot.io/

Shoutout to the main @Steepshot team
@pmartynov, @vitality, and @korzunav
Their team has been steadily growing since the founders began, be sure to give them a follow!



Use #Steeply on Steepshot posts for a chance to be featured in my Steepshot digest called @Steeply

📷 Also join their awesome Facebook group where we are building a community around the platform! - https://www.facebook.com/groups/steepshot/
They also have a great Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/9QsYr9f 📣

🌎 Social Media
Steepshot Twitter: https://twitter.com/steepshot
Steepshot Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/steepshot
Steepshot Minds: https://www.minds.com/groups/profile/827682669560881152

@DTube is an amazing platform meant as a decentralized solution to YouTube's copyright, censorship and monetization issues. We are building a community around the platform!

🌎 Social Media
DTube Twitter: https://twitter.com/dtube_official
DTube Instagram: https://www.instagram/dtube_official
Discord Group: https://discordapp.com/invite/9QsYr9f 📣
DTube Minds: https://www.minds.com/groups/profile/827680596576460800
Official Site: https://about.d.tube/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dtube/

@ScottCBusiness

💡 If you have heard about Minds and are thinking of joining up use my referral - https://www.minds.com/register?referrer=scottcbusiness
📊 Binance is my favorite place to trade, sign up with my referral - https://www.binance.com/?ref=15520033
💸 If you haven’t signed up, do so using my referral code 15520033

If you sign up on either and show me a screenshot, I’ll send you 0.1 SBD and give you a follow

✅ Join our @Steemersbot communities to network and grow together with our other Steemers - https://www.facebook.com/groups/Steemers/
Our pinned post has a bunch of resource for you to use and contribute to!
Also join our Discord channel - https://discord.gg/hNMjvBz 📣
We have lists of other servers, upvote bots, promo, discussion, contests, faucets, and everything you can think of!
W can also chat on Telegram - https://t.me/steemers 📩
We share our promotional posts here for now mostly

Use #WhatsUpSteemit for a chance to be featured in my other digest What's Up

🙌 You can also follow me on:
Twitter - https://twitter.com/Scottcbusiness
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ScottCBusiness
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/scottcbusiness
LinkedIn - https://ca.linkedin.com/in//scottcbusiness
Steemit - https://steemit.com/@scottcbusiness
Discord - ScottCBusiness#5242
Minds - https://www.minds.com/scottcbusiness

Proxy

Proxying your vote is pretty simple you just go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses navigate to the bottom and type in a username here:

I have started to take an active interest in Steem witnesses treating them as future global decentralized politics. If you don't want to learn or bother to stay up to date with it, but do not want your vote wasted then you can make me your proxy to vote on your behalf!

Delegation

📲 If you don’t always use your vote power or all your SP or just want to get upvoted regularly, you can delegate SP to me to receive upvotes on all your content
Use https://steembottracker.com/ to delegate any amount to me!