RE: Demystifying HIVE: What are Witnesses?

Thanks for your nice post about witnesses @slobberchops 👍

For those who would be interested in who @blocktrades is, I suggest you read this fabulous post by Tim Copeland on decrypt.co : Steem vs Tron: The rebellion against a cryptocurrency empire

Little addition on the rules of witnesses, they're also in charge of providing an updated price feed to ensure that an exact amount is shown as a reward on your posts. Typically, they provide this feed every hour by posting it in the blockchain.

Another thing to consider when choosing a witness is the number of missed blocks (the number of failed attempts to write a block because the server didn't respond in time). For a high ranked witness, it's normal to have few of them (in the top 20, they write almost 1400 blocks/day) but not for the lowest, this may be a sign of an unsuitable (cheaper) server configuration/specification.

You can see these information on https://hive.arcange.eu/witnesses/ (from @arcange witness) or here https://www.cutehive.com/witnesses.php (from @oflyhigh witness)