Roughly 2 weeks ago 3 Steemians set up a witness project here on Steem. @swisswitness
Here is how I thought this would go
I am a optimistic kinda guy so for me the glass is always half full
- We have a good server
- We had managed set it up correctly (after a few tries and missing our first block)
- we are good people (at least that is what we think of ourselves)
So now it would be as easy as just asking people that have witness votes left over or are voting for dead witnesses (ones that are no longer active but still receive votes) and they would just give them to us. Then we would break even and we could buy our second server and expand and serve and secure the blockchain even better all the while helping and supporting projects on Steem.
NOT REALLY...
First of all, I have the impression that a lot of people do not realize that a vote for a witness and an upvote for a post are two different things.
- so you can just upvote a post
OR
- vote for a witness
A vote for a witness is permanent (until you revoke it) and is your support for someone that is trying to make the Steem blockchain better, more decentralized and more secure. It is a bit like voting for a political candidate that you like without having to endorse a whole party. You can vote for 30 people you like...
IT DOES NOT COST YOU ANYTHING
But in the end it seems that we have to hustle and beg for votes everywhere anyway.
Secondly the people with huge amounts of votes available are very hard to reach (or just anonymous accounts). Now if you already have used your 30 witness votes I can understand that you do not want to change, that is fair.
But if you have not voted and have some spare votes, then give some smaller projects a chance. You do not lose anything. Your vote on the smaller witnesses gives the blockchain more stability and it helps spread the wealth.
Thirdly there is something that really bothered me and I will not name any names but in the time i have now spent lobbying for witness support there have been an number of people that wanted a financial contribution for their vote. This to me is a strange thing to ask. You spend something that does not cost you anything, that helps the network and you still want money for it??? I declined even though it might have cost us some positions in the ranking but it is not a road I want to turn into.
Do you think it is OK to pay for witness votes?
let me know in the replies what you think on this
a solution to this whole thing might be something that I really believe in and it is that :
Steem needs a bigger middle class.
- This can come from investors
- from people that power up
- can trickle down from delegations and votes.
Once we have a bit of SP we will start delegating that to projects that also support Steem Growth and use option 3 to help build that middle class.
but let me give you a calculation for now:
1 CHF is roughly 1 USD
Server Costs: 180 CHF / month (if paid per 3 months)
Blocks generated: 0,9 / day = 27 SP per month
27 SP * 3(optimistic current rate) = 91 CHF
So that means we are PAYING 90 bucks per month to help make the blockchain more secure
and all we want from you is something that costs you nothing.
your spare vote for our witness...
here is how you can vote for us:
OR
- go to this site and scroll down https://steemit.com/~witnesses
once you have you will see this box:
just fill in the name and press vote.
then the name will appear under the box and that is how it should be. That means the vote is set.
And if you really do not care for this witness thing but would like to help out and trust us (at least a bit) then you can proxy your vote (not your voting power, just your witness votes)
on the same page as before and under the box to vote for witness there is another one "set proxy"
if you have any questions, just ask
If you have already voted for us then thank you and if you just added your vote we hope we will be able to serve you well in the future.
@felander
A successful witness will not happen overnight. Keep doing what is best for the community, along the way you will pickup some votes.
I speak for my own experience, almost a year now and still paying for Witness servers out of pocket.
If your goal is to help the community long term that will not be an issue. You will find other ways or get help to keep up the servers running.
The amount of SBD/STEEM that you will get from this post is good for a month of server hosting :)
We are steeming for the future.
Cheers @yehey
I know this is a project for the long haul. but I think there are so many wasted votes out there and that is a shame
Indeed if the price goes up a bit then so will the profitability of more witnesses but for now that is not the case. For the moment we are just running the one server but I guess I would like to have this a bit bigger. We would not even take out anything in the first 6 months anyway (at least not with the one server)
There are a few projects coming up in the near future as you say.
And I do agree with you: we are steeming for the future
Please name those names. We all want to know who the filthbags are.
like I said on steem.chat, they were random users and not witnesses. And as also pointed out in the post answer from @jefpatat the blockchain seems to push people in that direction for now so we cannot really blame them.
I commented before I asked you in chat. It's pretty sad that that's the case and in general, its a worthless endeavor to try and sell these votes. Whose to say the vote isn't taken away after the payment is sent?
yea, very true, you never know if someone will "stay bought" and I prefer to get the votes because people like what we do
Goodluck!
thanks, we can use it
any chance you would replace wackou with us ? they have been inactive for roughly 1.5 months
No I do not think it is ok to pay for witness votes. And no I do not think it is ok to pay for normal votes. But what did you expect? A lot of the big accounts support various kind of pay for normal vote. And that vote doesn't cost anything either. Do you expect any thing else for witness votes?
To me it sounds exactly the same as for normal votes. Begging, paying or not caring and moving on. I understand that running a witness costs some resource (money) but it also pays to do so (if top 100?). If you work hard, become noted, stand out and become successful votes might come easier. That sounds exactly the same as blogging for most of us. Except the resource is not money, but time invested in creating content, in doing something with/for the platform.
I understand that this doesn't motivate to helping with supporting the network and decentralization. But if that's the case then there's something wrong with the fundamental design.
The steem POS mechanism is flawed in a lot of aspects. POS is being confused with governance here. That's why I value my witness votes so much. It's my only chance of influencing the platform.
Paying for free witness votes is not ok, but paying for free curation votes is?
you might have a point there. I (for myself) have thought of them as different things. ie the normal and the witness votes. but the behavior seems indeed to be the same.
I do admit to using smartmarket to sell my spare voting power and to buy my votes. I was delegating a big part to smartsteem (bot) but have taken that down a notch. I have started re-delegating this to different projects like @steem-ambassador and now also a bit to @steemhunt.
I realize that my return will be less but am willing to live with that since it helps grow steem
I still believe selling my spare voting power is ok but I am no longer supporting the bidbots though and this has come through a lot of conversations with different people (you among them) these last weeks.
So thank you for the cool discord chat and for this honest reply