RE: Inactive and outdated Witnesses
Dear @quochuy
It seem that you're number 53 already. Climbing up! :)
The problem I see is the fact, that most people (including me) do not understand the reasons why others want to become a witness. There isn't much responsibility that witnesses seem to hold. Few "whales" and few top witnesses are the only ones that have any impact at all on Steemit Inc.
So voting on witness seem to be generally pointless.
The blockchain used to have a rule that automatically skip inactive witnesses that are still registered after 24 hours of inactivity. That meant that you could just turn off your witness and the blockchain would just ignore you after 24 hours.
That doesnt seem to be a good rule. Perhaps not being active for 1 month should do the trick. But one day? :/
Anyway, I voted on you. However I would like to learn what is it in it for you. How can you benefit from becoming a witness? Even if you would reach top20 (very difficult) - what then?
Yours, Piotr
Hi @crypto.piotr
Thanks for the witness vote and interesting topic.
Being a witness in the top20 will give you a high reward, currently about USD294.00 per week (see my witness earnings report), as the price of Steem goes up that reward goes higher too.
For witnesses below the top20, the reward drops dramatically but you can still manage to get some profit if you do your homework and find an affordable server.
I currently earn USD17.76 per week and my server costs me USD37.50 per month. The extra helps me pay for servers for other Steem related projects (Hivemind node, Discord bot server, IPFS pinning server...).
The witness (producer) reward are paid in STEEM Power, so it's a kind of investment. I use fiat to pay for the witness server that then generates SP instead of using fiat to buy STEEM and powering up.
It's also the pride of contributing for something you believe in.
The main priority of a witness is to sign blocks, host the blockchain and ensure a secure and reliable network. Without Steem witnesses there is no Steem blockchain and we won't be having this conversation on my blog post. A top20 witness needs to pay for a reliable and fast server that can handle a lot of transactions or else it will affect all Steemians. This is the reason why Steemians (including witnesses) need to choose their vote properly and remove votes from witnesses that are not performing. The zombie witnesses above, for example, are missing blocks everytime it is their turn. By removing votes from them, they will drop ranking and will get less blocks to sign hence less chance to disturb the network.