ChillBill’s witness update. I’ve entered a rabbit hole.

ChillBill’s witness update. I’ve entered a rabbit hole.

So my witness has been up for a day. It has not yet received a block. I cant find out how many witnesses are out there and I have no idea where I am in the ranking.
… and the rabbit hole goes deeper.

I have found a great page that lists the top 200 witnesses which shows how blocks are allocated.
https://bitcoiner.me/schedule/?c=show200
By @bitcoiner . I’ve given him my puny witness vote.

At best this process can be called inversely asymptotic. The further you are from the top of the list the more your chances shrink of ever getting a job/reward.

The 20 oligarchs at the top get 20/21ths of the whole pie, zipping around the loop only letting in one outsider to the feast every time.

All the other Steem Witnesses have to share this 1/21st between them, that is 4.8% of the pie reserved for all the rest of the plebs like me.

It would be medieval if it wasn't for the fact peasants weren’t treated that poorly in the dark ages.

There are more Witnesses than the 200 shown out there, I’m not on the list for starters, so 180+ witnesses have to share less than 4.8% of what’s on offer, the same as a single Oligarch in the top 20.
But it gets worse. Really!

If you are say 30th on the list, you progress up the stack and get your crumb of a crumb every few minutes. But no one much lower than that on the list gets to progress as you rise, because ‘Mr 30th place,’ does not go to the back of the queue. They jump the queue back to roughly 30th place.

In this way number 40 in the cue in unlikely to progress up the list. Instead based on the queue jumping, No 40, will only excruciatingly slowly filter towards the top. You can see it for yourself in action.

The lower down the list you are, the longer the filtration takes. But its not linear, the horizon gets exponentially further away the further you are down the list.

So Mr 199 who thirty minutes ago was at 59 place in the list, still hasn’t moved 1 single place after untold rounds. Heaven knows how long it takes to get from bottom of the list to the top, but it’s an nightmarishly gruesome amount of time for a single crumb.

Kafka would be proud.

So I’m going to be keep track of this process for a bit, so users who are being encouraged to stump up real money on servers to support this process can gauge if this system is for them.

In any game you have to watch which way the money flows. If it is to the ‘house’ or Oligarchs, unless you love to lose, you better not play.

If you would like to give me your witness vote, then please do, as without a lot of votes I won’t even be in the top two hundred so will never find out what happens next.

I’ll keep you posted.

(Wow, while I was copy checking, 1 hr in, Mr 199 has not risen, instead he has just dropped down a place. That’s even worse.)