Votes on posts pay once. Votes for witness pay indefinitely up to 0.18 Steem every 63 seconds equal to over $300 A DAY in Steem Power for the top 20 witnesses! View the list of witnesses at https://steemd.com/witnesses and adjust witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses. When we would like to vote for a witness outside the top 50 such as jerrybanfield, type the account name in the box at the bottom of https://steemit.com/~witnesses and hit vote just once! If you click the blue upvote button beside any vote outside the top 50, that vote will then be removed! Refreshing the page is an easy way to verify the votes are there for any non top 50 witnesses! The voting box looks like this!

What is the easiest way to handle Steem witness voting?

The easiest way to vote for witnesses is to set a proxy. If we would rather never think about the word witness again, we can set someone we trust to make all of our 30 witness votes for us. I choose each of my witness votes carefully based on what the witness is giving to the community and/or how the witness has personally collaborated with me. If you would rather not think about witness voting again but still would like your vote to count, make me your proxy because then all witness voting is done automatically for you through my votes?

Are the top 20 Steem witnesses really earning $300+ a day?

YES! With the current price of Steem at around $1.20 and the current earnings for each witness equal to about 250 Steem Power a day, that is $300+ A DAY earned by EVERY top 20 witness. Here is a video explaining more which I will soon make into a full post with pictures showing the inside of the Steem witness system! Note that I used the word mining in the video to maximize traffic on YouTube while we call the system here Delegated Proof of Stake or just Steem witnesses to describe those participating in the process of creating the blockchain.

How many users vote for witnesses?

• With 312,805 accounts today according to https://steemdata.com/stats, only one witness @good-karma has more than 1% of existing users voting for him as a witness. No other witness has even 1% of total users voting which makes participation in the witness process even worse than voting for president in the US!
• Less than 8% of all users even make 1 vote for witness as explained a post by a fellow witness @lukestokes at https://steemit.com/witness-category/@lukestokes/how-many-steemians-are-not-voting-for-a-witness-i-found-the-answer. In summary, over 100,000 active users have never made even one witness vote. As you can see, we as witnesses are working to change that with continuing education about how important it is to vote for witnesses.
• Followers of @jerrybanfield have the lowest percentage of witness participation of any witness with 11,000+ followers making a total of 362 witness votes equal to about 3% of followers also voting for witness. Thank you very much to each voter on the list at https://steemdb.com/@jerrybanfield/witness that has taken the time to make a witness vote or proxy!
• Followers of @teamsteem and @jerrybanfield by total voting shares have the lowest participation among the top 100 witnesses with @teamsteem having almost enough follower voting power to be in the top 20 at 48.392 GV while the actual votes are 15.772 GV meaning less than a third of total voting power from followers is leading to witness votes. @jerrybanfield stats are close to the same with 32.676 GV owned by those following and a total of 10.831 GV in actual votes which is because of the generosity of a few whales following that took the time to vote!

Why are witness votes so critical to the future of Steem?

1. With paying Steem Power to witnesses every day to build the blockchain, witnesses in the top 30 are earning enough to continuously have a greater influence in our community through author rewards and curation. When we vote those up we trust to give the most back, we are planting seeds to receive back the most in rewards ourselves.
2. The top 20 witnesses make the decisions on which versions of Steem to run meaning that updates requested by Steemit Inc can be rejected if enough top 20 witnesses agree. When we vote witnesses up we trust to make decisions that benefit us, we are certain to have our interests represented going forward.
3. Users often hate changing witness votes meaning once the vote is cast, it often takes a significant event to prompt a change. While it is good to have patience and tolerance with the life situations of each witness and not remove votes every missed block, not updating our witness votes on a regular basis can allow witnesses to keep earning even with little or no service to our community while those that are newer or less popular can invest a lot of effort without receiving much in return. Review witness status at https://steemd.com/witnesses by noticing the version, price feed, number of misses, and whether the witness name is crossed out or not. Notice the witnesses towards the bottom are active and still have offline witnesses above them including several offline for most of 2017. Before writing this post, I was also voting for two offline witnesses and just reached out of them yesterday after removing my votes to ask if they would be updating!
4. Witnesses are our front line of defense against attack and are critical for our growth. Unsecured and inattentive witness servers make it easy disrupt our blockchain. While our choices for the top 20 witnesses are the most critical, the top 50 spots are essential to have witnesses most ready to serve in the top 20 at a moment's notice in case of emergency.

In summary, most of us put a lot of thought into our upvotes on posts carefully selecting the percentage and taking pride in the authors we upvote and recommending posts to our friends. According to the data, we often ignore making our most powerful upvotes in the form of support for witnesses. In my first month, I did not make any votes for witness either and hope this post is useful today for us to be aware of where our greatest voting power is available in the form of our witness votes!

Would you join us today in voting for witnesses at https://steemit.com/~witnesses and refresh the page for any upvotes for those outside of the top 50 to verify they went through correctly because when we participate in the witness voting process, we feel empowered in our community here on Steem?

OR

Love,
Jerry Banfield