>

witness issues and witness explanation for blocks.

---

Sitting in the witness chat figuring out the issues with steemit's server issues and will get my server bumped to 64GB Dedicated server.

When I came to a comment made by @aggroed which has been on all witnesses minds well I assume since its been asked around quite a bit lately.

The comment/chat starts off like this:

"How witness votes are distributed to the best of my knowledge:"

Every 3 seconds there is a new block. The blocks go in a rotation of 21 spots. I will call the rotating witness spot the "wild block." 20 of the 21 blocks are witnessed by whoever is in the top 20 during that 63 seconds. So, out of every 63 seconds the top 20 people will consistently witness 1 block. Then there is the back up witness spot or the wild block. Every 63 seconds a person at random is called from spot 21 and down. The formula describing your percent chance of getting a wild block is the following

Every 3 seconds 1 Top witness which is some one 1-20 plus a witness from 21-100 will both witness a block together. One home one end.

(your GV/total voting GV for all active witnesses under 20) *100 = percent chance you witness the wild block

So, the "rank" of your witness doesn't play into the calculation. Only the amount of GV relative to everyone else fighting for the wild block. Rank is a rough estimate for the liklihood you'll catch a block.

For example.

If witness 21 had 90GV and all the rest of the witnesses below 21 had 10GV then witness 21 would get 90% of those blocks throughout the day and everyone else would get 10% of them. Alternatively, if witness 21 had 10GV and the rest had 90GV then they would get 10% of the wild blocks.

In terms of reward a top 20 witness will witness approximately 1400 blocks a day and currently gets approximately 0.19 steem/block for it. The folks outside of the top 20 will witness varying numbers of blocks per day and get ~.95 steem/block for it. I typically see people ranked at the low 20s getting 60 blocks per day. Assuming that's 365 days a year it's over 18,000 Steem/year. At $1/steem that's $18,000. At $2 steem that's $36,000 per year. Running the server for most people is $80 or less per month, or somewhere less than $1,000. Most people only need 2 blocks per day to break even (cost wise, not time wise) which you can get with one sizable whale vote.

You all might see $$$ But it takes a bit of time to have the servers running at optimal speed, and time is not cheap.

This is a very good explanation about block earnings for steem and the amount of blocks produced.