🧟 Bring out your dead: are your witness votes supporting ghosts?

There are quite a few things in life that we set up once and then quietly assume will continue working forever. Direct debits, smoke detectors, backups, children… although that last one may require slightly more maintenance than advertised.

Witness votes often end up in the same category.

You vote for a few Hive witnesses, perhaps add some more over the years, and then mostly forget about them. The votes remain there, faithfully doing what you told them to do, even when the witness behind one of those votes stopped producing blocks sometime around the invention of fire.

So, an honest question: when did you last check your witness votes?

If the answer is “I have no idea”, you are definitely not alone. Even large and very active accounts had a vote for a disabled witness hiding in their list. Apparently, blockchain governance does not protect us from digital clutter either.

What witness voting actually does

Hive is not run by a company with a server hidden in a cupb

oard somewhere. The blockchain is maintained by witnesses, community members who run the infrastructure needed to produce blocks, publish price feeds and keep the network operating.

There are 21 active block-producing slots: the top 20 elected witnesses and one rotating backup witness. Your Hive Power gives weight to your witness votes, and every account can vote for up to 30 witnesses.

Those votes matter because they help determine which witnesses receive enough support to produce blocks and take responsibility for the infrastructure beneath everything we do on Hive. Every post, comment, transfer, game transaction and token-related experiment eventually depends on that infrastructure working properly, preferably without smoke coming from the server rack.

If you do not want to follow witness activity yourself, you can also appoint a proxy. That allows a trusted account to manage witness votes on your behalf, which is useful if governance is not how you planned to spend your Sunday afternoon.

The problem with setting votes and forgetting them

Witnesses come and go. Some stop because running the infrastructure no longer makes financial sense, some move on to other projects, and others simply disappear without much ceremony. Servers rarely receive a retirement party.

Their witness votes do not disappear with them, however. Unless voters remove those votes, they remain attached to the account, pointing at a witness that may no longer have an active signing key or produce anything at all.

That does not break Hive, but it does mean part of your governance weight is doing precisely nothing. Worse, a disabled witness can remain ranked above an active backup witness that is still maintaining servers, installing updates and occasionally wondering why everything decided to break at three in the morning.

It is not malicious, and it is not even unusual. It is simply what happens when governance meets human memory.

A witness health check, without requiring a medical degree

That is why I added a witness health check to:

https://governance.botlord.eu

Enter your Hive account and the tool checks every witness you currently support, then explains the result in reasonably normal human language:

• Disabled means the witness has removed its signing key and shut down. That vote is officially haunting your account.

• Not producing means a top-20 witness is currently expected to produce blocks but appears to be down.

• Active means the witness is producing, running a current version and publishing a recent price feed.

• Missed blocks shows the lifetime number of blocks that witness has missed.

That final number needs a little context, because a witness that has been running for many years will naturally have collected missed blocks along the way. A large lifetime number does not automatically mean the witness is unreliable, just as having visited a DIY shop 300 times does not make you a carpenter. I have tested this theory extensively.

If the tool finds disabled witnesses, it now gives you a “Clean up N dead votes” button. It removes all those votes in a single transaction, which means one click, one Hive Keychain confirmation and considerably less repetitive clicking.

Your keys never leave Keychain. The site prepares the transaction, Keychain signs it in your wallet, and Hive records the changes. No keys are stored or sent to my server, because collecting other people’s active keys seems like an unnecessarily exciting way to ruin a perfectly normal week.

After the cleanup, the tool can optionally suggest active witnesses for the newly available slots. You remain completely free to choose whom you support, of course. The purpose is to clean up dead votes, not replace them with whatever I happen to fancy before breakfast.

Check them once in a while

Witness voting should not really be a “set it once and forget it for seven years” affair. You do not need to inspect the witness rankings every morning while drinking coffee, but checking your votes every few months is not a bad habit.

Open https://governance.botlord.eu, run the health check and see whether all your votes still support witnesses that are actually active. It takes less than a minute, clears out the ghosts and gives active witnesses a better chance of receiving the support they need.

The tool is free and optional. If it proves useful, you can also vote for @botlord as a witness, which helps me keep building and, more importantly, helps pay for the servers that apparently have developed a taste for electricity.

Now go and check your votes.

There may be ghosts in there, and unlike most ghost stories, these can be removed with Hive Keychain.

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