The role of a witness in the Steem Blockchain is to verify incoming transactions, produce blocks when scheduled, and partake in the Steem governance model by voting on several parameters.
These parameters control various aspects of the operation of the blockchain that are not easily defined in code at compile time. One example is the STEEM price feed that defines the conversion rate between STEEM and SBD.
Witnesses are able to use the witness_set_properties_operation to change witness specific properties and vote on paramters.
Unless otherwise noted, the median of the top 20 elected witnesses is used for all calculations needing the parameter.
This operation was added in Steem v0.20.0 to replace the witness_update_operation which was not easily extendable. While it is recommended to use witness_set_properties_operation, witness_update_operation will continue to work.
This is the fee in STEEM that must be paid to create an account. This field must be non-negative.
The account subsidies to be added to the account subisidy per block. This is the maximum rate that accounts can be created via subsidization.
The value must be between 1 and 268435455 where 10000 is one account per block.
The per block decay of the account subsidy pool. Must be between 64 and 4294967295 (2^32) where 68719476736 (2^36) is 100% decay per block.
Below are some example values:
| Half-Life | account_subsidy_decay |
|---|---|
| 12 Hours | 3307750 |
| 1 Day | 1653890 |
| 2 Days | 826952 |
| 3 Days | 551302 |
| 4 Days | 413477 |
| 5 Days | 330782 |
| 6 Days | 275652 |
| 1 Week | 236273 |
| 2 Weeks | 118137 |
| 3 Weeks | 78757 |
| 4 Weeks | 59068 |
A more detailed explanation of resource dynamics can be found here.
The maximum size of a single block in bytes. The value must be not less than 65536. The value must not be more than 2MB (2097152).
The annual interest rate paid to SBD holders. SBD interest is compounded on balance changes, no more than once every 30 days.
The exchange rate for STEEM/SBD to be used for printing SBD as rewards as well as SBD->STEEM conversions. The actual price feed is the median of medians. Every round (21 blocks) the median exchange rate is pushed to a queue and the oldest is removed. The median value of the queue is used for any calculations.
A witness published URL, usually to a public seed node they operate, or a post about their witness. The URL must not be longer than 2048 characters.
Sets the signing key for the witness, which is used to sign blocks.