Mining STEEM, BLURT and HIVE: What is a Witness and How Does All This Work?

Witnesses are what make Graphene Blockchains (STEEM, BLURT & HIVE) work. You may have an understanding of how Bitcoin Mining Works, and understand that the Miners are holding open Nodes, this is the exact same concept going on to keep Steemit, BLURT blog and HIVE blog up. There are several people Mining each Currency, and the Bloggers have the ability to go and Vote for the Miners, these Miners are then called Witnesses and they are able to earn more and more based on the number of Votes they receive and how much STEEM, BLURT or HIVE is held by the users Voting for them. And each person gets to Vote for 30 Witnesses, many do not have rewards programs but some will reward you for Voting for them, this is also a good way to convince people to Vote for you as a Witnesses. Witnesses also are involved in the Hard Forks (HF) as in HF1, HF2, HF3, each of those being a New Blockchain, but all the Witnesses switched Nodes to the new one, so the Bloggers don't even notice and any upgrades needed have been added in the HardFork. I will get deeper into the Concept of a Hard Fork later in this posts, but first I want to introduce everyone to where to go to Vote for Witnesses.

These Links and Photos show the pages you use to Vote, and each person can Vote for 30 Witnesses:

https://blurtwallet.com/~witnesses

https://steemitwallet.com/~witnesses

https://wallet.hive.blog/~witnesses

You can see that many of the Witnesses have a Link to their Witness Post, this is something like an Introductory post for each Witness just kind of describing what they are doing there, and that is where you would add your pitch or whatever it would be called, where you tell everyone why they should Vote for you and what you will do for them.

To become a Witness it is actually not super complicated, you do not have to be a Programmer to Mine STEEM, BLURT and HIVE but it is not point-and-click either, and something like a Politician you will have to win people over so they Vote for you. Writing Guides like this can actually help you become a higher paid Witness because you can use yourself as the example and teach people how to Vote for Witnesses by showing them how to Vote for you and you are already doing something for them by teaching them. But this guide is for new users, so now I will get into how to become a Witness for anyone who may want to become a Witness.

How to Mine BLURT a.k.a How to Become a BLURT Witness
https://blurt.blog/blurt365/@punicwax/how-to-mine-blurt

Here are some guides for Mining STEEM, a.k.a. How to Become a Steemit Witness
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@bitcalm/how-to-become-a-witness

https://steemit.com/witness-category/@personz/the-really-gentle-guide-to-becoming-a-witness

https://steemit.com/steemit/@jerrybanfield/becoming-a-steem-witness

How to Mine HIVE a.k.a. How to Become a HIVE Witness
https://peakd.com/hive-139531/@someguy123/how-to-set-up-a-hive-witness-or-seed-node-non-mira-upgrade-from-steem-docker-to-hive-docker

https://hive.ausbit.dev/engine/@rishi556/how-to-set-up-a-hive-engine-witness-step-by-step-guide

Witnesses can be compared to Super Reps on the Tron (TRX) Blockchain, the difference being that STEEM, BLURT and HIVE are Graphene, while ETH and TRX are called Dagger Hashimoto or DAG, and TRX actually copied a very old Version of ETH instead of a new one and made it a Java chain. A Super Rep is just like a Witness, but the Votes come from people who have TRX staked (Frozen) in their Wallet, there are also more commonly found rewards with the Super Reps, where Witnesses rarely offer rewards, TRX are also the owners of Steemit and holding TRX helps you earn it in your Steemit Wallet.

Here is my TRX Wallet on Steemit
TMAWssKiRFVbSBBAFAd22AgrSA3rSzBMUx

So back to HardForks,
The ETH/ETC Hard Fork was the first most famous. This was an event where ETH had a Smart Contract Exchange called EtherDelta, and it was hacked the hacker being dubbed "the EtherDelta hacker", he stole so much ETH from so many high value accounts that everyone was arguing about it and they actually decided to Fork ETH back to before the Hack. Forking ETH in and of itself is not such a big deal, you could do it, I could do it, and we could operate it like a Public-Private Cloud for our Community. But the argument here was "can we get everyone using ETH to log into the New Wallets abd stop using the old ones", and the answer there was "No", they did the Hard Fork (meaning they Forked and Migrated their Wallets), but they found that many did not switch and continued on the old Blockchain, in fact many who switched still continued selling the ETH from the old Blockchain. This became confusing in the Markets and it created 2 entirely distinct Blockchains, ETC is Ethereum Classic, the Original "real" chain, and ETH is now the Hard Fork, the Forked chain that everyone moved to.

This is how STEEM, BLURT and HIVE HardForks work also, but the Witnesses make an agreement beforehand, so there is not a big split. Though we have seen Steemit Fork and Split, which is why BLURT and HIVE exist. An example of a STEEM Hard Fork is that early on posts had maybe 24 hrs to get Votes, and it wasn't long enough so they made it a 7 day payout, and that was too short so they created a 30 day payout once where you could collect Votes on a post for 30 Days, the issue there being that if you are using the Platform to receive Charity type help, people's Votes aren't very Charitable if they take 30 Days to pay out and the people are in an emergency, and even outside of that the 30 Days was just too long for people to want to wait.

A big Hard Fork was the removal of the Bridge Toll, it used to take 2 years to Power Down your STEEM Power, this created rarity and raised retention, because when your money is locked up and only released in week increments for 104 Weeks, you tend to pay attention to the Platform and care about the price, etc. Rather than Cashing out and Checking out mentally.

That should get everyone prepared to become a Witness if they choose, and we suggest joining the Van Kush Beauty Economy and hope that this guide reaches those in our Community and then we can begin to work to Establish our Economy throughout the Blockchain world.

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