To make a long story short: you can’t mine steem.
Or, to be more precise, you can’t mine steem anymore. In the early days of Steemit this was possible, but as the miners got the quirks of the algorithm and conquered the mining queue with just 2 or 3 players, the general consensus led to the elimination of the mining entirely.
The Long Story
You can get steem in 3 ways:
- by blogging
- by buying it on an exchange
- by supporting the network as a witness
What Is A Witness?
The functional role of a witness is described here, but before jumping to that link, please spend some time here to learn about PoS.
PoS (Proof Of Stake), as opposed to the more popular PoW (Proof of Work) it's the underlying mechanism of the Steemit consensus. If you want to become a witness, you have to own (or have invested in you by other people) a certain amount of Steem. Meaning to have some stake in the network. It’s all described in the white paper, but if you don’t have time to read it, it’s ok, I’l try to make that in plain English below.
How Do I Get That Stake?
Please refer to the way you can get Steem above: you can blog your way into it, you can buy it, or you can get it in the form of votes from other people.
So, there are two types of votes in the Steemit network: a vote that gives people money (to put it shortly) and a vote that gives people power as witnesses. The votes that give money are the ones you give to each post or comment, while the votes that give people power are the ones you can give to witnesses here, on this page.
How Much Stake Is Needed To Become A Witness?
To be in the top 100 witnesses, you need around 198 million vests invested into you. Which means around 100k Steem. At the current price of Steem, which is around $2, that means around 200k USD.
What Machine Do I Need For Maintaining A Witness?
RAM is crucial, as part of the blockchain is held on RAM. Otherwise, any decent machine will do it.
How Do I Make People Vote For Me As A Witness?
Be useful to them and they will vote you.
I Don’t Know Which One To Vote, But I Have Some People I Trust, Can I Delegate Them To Vote For Me?
Yes, it’s called proxy witness delegation and you can do it on the same witnesses page.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):
"What Machine Do I Need For Maintaining A Witness?"
With the price of entry currently around 200k, apparently you need a time machine.
Thank you @lig007. Best one liner I've seen in a long time!
The best comment so far! Upsteemed full power :)
A time machine hahahahahha. Steem is so damn feudal, if only I had heard about it earlier and mined it, would have so much STEEM power.
Oh well, will have to keep an eye out for new crypto's with potential. @dragosroua what resources are out there to have an eye out on CPU/GPU mining coins which have just been ICO'd?
To be honest, I don't follow them very close. I'm subscribed to a few FB groups (Romanian content, though) and I check a new coin every once in a while, if I see it there. Going with the flow, so to speak.
Think its time for me to research all new ICO's then :P
Just stumbled on this thread, it's not new but #gridcoin is a CPU/GPU mineable coin and always will be
New "Community Tokens" that could be built on the Steemit blockchain should be developed as "ground-level" opportunities for maintaining a witness within the respective community token environment.
To be witness I guess you need to be nimble to play the game and know the system like the back of your hand.
If i invest 200K for witness, how much profit i can expect to get monthly? When will be my ROI?
A runner-up witness (top 50) can produce between 20 and 45 blocks per day. At the current price of Steem, that is between $40 and $90/day, or between $1,200 and $2,700/month or between $12,000 and $32,400 per year (if I did the math correctly). As usual, witnesses / miners are betting on the price appreciation, so it's more of a medium / long term project.
Thanks for the clear explanation,... highly appreciated.
How does this cap work? There is at least one account in the top 19 which has less than 100,000 steem ( https://steemit.com/@klye/transfers ), and several in the top 50 that have less than 100,000. Are these account somehow grandfathered in, or how do they work at witnesses with less than the minimum?
I tried to run a witness node on my Ubuntu machine, but it seems far too tech for my knowledge. (well, the steemd application was running, but couldn't confing a witness account in it)
It does have a learning curve.
Thanks for that info, didn't realise there we so many people invested so heavily in Steemit.
Thanks for the excellent post. Besides the hardware requirements, are there any requirements in terms of internet connection bandwidth? It seems like being witness might be somewhat data heavy as well.
Yes, network latency is also very important. With blocks produced every 3 seconds, you need very good connectivity.
Thx as usual your share the newst news ! Thx all best broo !! 👌
Currently I am a minnows and with 1.299 steem power. I am using windows pc a 64 bit OS, cpu intel core i7 32 GB RAM and dedicated nvidia graphics. Result 0 block in a days but i dont know how to quit.
Very interesting there is a lot of things I did not know. 100,000 Steem is still not nothing. What does it win when we have a witness?
great information it will help the minnows out .
upvoted and resteemed
thanks for sharing
Thank you for great articke ;)
Thanks for sharing @dragosroua! Didn't know what is the cost of becoming witness at all. Now thinking that if SteemDollar goes up, it makes it even more special to be a witness and bigger amounts of investments. Really excited.
sounds like a good system for vetting or for voting for the witnesses
Good article, clarified some things for me.
Voted for you this morning and blogged about Witnesses today too. Gone down like a lead balloon thus far so I might have to get @randowhale on the case!
Never mined in my life so this post was useful.
A good post and helpful tips. This motivated me to inspire to be a witness and I will reach that goal. Fired up and ready to go.
cool post, thanks
Exelent
informations
Very informative. I've often wondered what this "witness thing" is all about, but have been too busy trying to learn everything else to take the time to delve into it. You have provided a clear, concise high-level overview that even a non-techie newbie such as myself can understand!
So wait... you technically, can't mine STEEM anymore? How about cloud miners like EoBot that still has STEEM in it? Does that mean they are in some kind of PoS network or is a Witness of some sort?
Just still very confused about this.
Anybody who advertises STEEM as being mineable is lying to you. They may have a witness and they may share their rewards with you, but that's not mining. And it looks shady as fuck.
hm. I have been getting paid with LiteCoin and BitCoin mining there, and they added STEEM when it was first launched. Perhaps they are one of the witnesses then.
The concise content in this post & series is a really helpful executive summary. I've found it particularly helpful in getting a very basic understanding of the Steemit block-chain's utility as a platform that can potentially support "open business models", as introduced by Paul Stacey on Medium last year.
I only want to be a witness and pay for my server which requires less than 1 STeem/day. I assume I don't need to be in the top 100 for that, do I ?
Wow 200K? that is huge! looking at my account at the moment and what it needs to be... well theres a lot of comments and posts required between here and then. Thanks for the info - something to aspire too... cheers.
Nice post and advices. Maybe some of that posts should have a pinned option like in forums :-).
To be found by rookies in the begining of their journey.
Finding this too late or not at all is not helping.
I wanted to resteem but is to old. Can i make a post with some text and make it live again with your link and credits for it?
Cheers and best wishes!
This post is very important
Thankful for u
I like
Thanks for the useful tip-off
@planetauto this is the post I think you were interested in.
This article really broke things down for me, so that I have a better understanding on what it takes to become a witness. I hope to one day get to that pinnacle of having 198 million vests. Right now, I'm at 86,000 - so I have a long way to go!
All I can say is keep steeming and hopefully, I'll one day reach that stage! Still, I remain proud to be a part of the Steemit community!