CoinGecko Witness Update #2 - August 2019

We’ve been operating a Witness node on Steem for close to 8 months now. As the Steem community gears up for Hard Fork 21, things are busy around here while we count down the days to switch upgrade our servers and bring the Steem blockchain forward towards a new chapter.

If you have any questions regarding our campaign at all, please feel free to leave your comments below and we will do our best to answer them.

Here are some quick updates:

Current Witness Rank	68
Active Witness Rank	66
Average Blocks signed daily	~ 11

Why Witnesses Matter

For this edition’s update, we would like to declare the witness we’ve voted. As a stakeholder of the blockchain, every steemian have the obligation and duty to appoint and vote for witness nodes that will maintain the integrity of the blockchain. Every vote is important as they basically decide the direction of which this decentralized community should take.

While developers (either @steemitblog’s staff, witnesses themselves, or volunteer Steemian devs) propose, debate, and develop the next features and upgrades to be included in the next hard forks. It is the witness nodes who will have the final decision of choosing to implement the upgrades into the live blockchain during a hard fork.

It is this careful check and balance between developers and witnesses that keep the innovation of this decentralized blockchain ongoing.

Witnesses should be overall technically reliable and more importantly, share the same sense of direction as the overall Steem community.

Shedding light on who we voted for Witness

Staying true to our ethos of transparency. We will reveal the witnesses we are currently voting on the Steem Blockchain and more importantly, our motivations behind the vote.

Currently, we have used 18 of 30 witness votes on the following witnesses:

Witnesses	Our Reasons
@aggroed	on his work on PAL and Steem Engine
@arcange	for his amazing @steemsql tool which we have used to publish the Steem 2018 Report
@bitrocker2020	Malaysian Steem Ambassador who advised and supported our exploration into Steem
@blockbrothers	to support their active work in the Dutch Community
@cervantes	to support their active work in the Latin American Community
@curie	to support their amazing work in support underappreciated content
@drakos	active Steem developer who contributed valuable technical help to our witness node
@firepower	to support his active work in the Indian Community
@Followbtcnews	for maintaining Steem.chat, an integral chatroom to the steem community
@good-karma	to support his work on the @esteemapp dapp
@justyy	to support his active work in the Chinese Community
@kevinwong	for his advice and support of our exploration into Steem
@partiko	to support their active work on the partiko dapp
@roelandp	to support his work on Steemfest and the Steemwallet dapp
@someguy123	to support his development work including steem’s Docker
@steemhunt	for their amazing work of building Steemhunt and Reviewhunt
@steempeak	to support their work on the Steempeak interface
@steempress	to support their work on Steempress

We have unvoted 1 witness during this period

Witness	Reason
@utopian-io	as they have shut down their nodes

Witness Votes will change

As you can see, we have only used 18 out of the 30 votes each steem account has at their disposal. These votes are by no means permanent as we try to support reliable witnesses that helps improve the Steem community as a whole - to the best of our judgement.

We understand that witness votes may be a sensitive issue within certain circles of the Steem community. However, our main goal is to support the ecosystem and further the development of the world's first blockchain-based social network. There are much more communities and amazing people that we have yet connected with here on Steem and it is our hope that that will eventually change.

Do inform us which other witnesses that should be on the list so that we can look into them.