RE: Witness Controlling Power, Witness Proxies, and Witness Voting
Thank you for pulling the info @paulag. This is an excellent posts and demonstrates what one can derive from the blockchain looking purely at the facts and numbers.
To qualify this a bit, for anyone who will comment "explaining" some of these figures; the information derived here is what an impartial and objective party would see when pulling it by itself. Let's say an investor wanted to figure out how probable launching a steem-based product would be and wanted to ascertain the reliability of the blockchain.
Witnesses on their own for the most part are not the majority SP holders and many power down regularly to process the funds and instead investing them in maintaining the servers and services. The old miners were but those are disabled for the most part and are currently not processing blocks. Disabled witnesses still have votes attributed to them but they do nothing. Ned and them don't vote for witnesses as a default, otherwise the official account would determine the whole roster. Pumpkin is disabled and thus isn't voting for itself.
The thing about proxies is its absolutely vital for those who have organic accounts proxied to them to objectively approve and focus on what's best for Steem. Not all do that. Unfortunately the numbers don't show who cast their vote for frivolous reasons and who did their homework. We run a witness and, to a point, know who interviews witnesses in detail before voting and who voted just to spite someone else.
Your conclusion is right on and we hope everyone on the platform does due research and takes care with their vote. Top witnesses have a lot of say in hardforks and other important directional matters and every approval counts. One pumpkin with its 15k mv is 15,000 minnow accounts with just a few hundred SP each.
First of all thanks for encouraging me to do this post, and also for the detailed reply.
I did not take into consideration disabled witnesses, in fact I was not aware witnesses become disabled. how and when does this happen?
Listed as red one here. The orange one don't have recently updated their price feed.
https://steemdb.com/witnesses
They become disabled when the owner no longer wishes to run it. A command is run to remove the witness from the rotation. A lot of the old miners are on the witness list but haven't been online in a long time. Take a look at @drakos' https://steemian.info/witnesses for the list. All the ones in the red are disabled. If "block age" is very low and they're red that means the owner took it offline for maintenance.
In the case of pumpkin, it's been off since HF 16. You can also see that it supports the registration fee of 100 steem and some other parameters. Also that 174 accounts still vote for it despite it having long been disabled.
thank you for sharing this with me. I was looking for a list that went beyond 100 and couldn't find it.