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@novacadian That was something I considered as well. If I were to set up a witness/seed node, my second one would probably be crowd funded. One of the witnesses I voted for, @justinadams has an initiative to build evergreen community nodes.

I think a community witness node could actually be monetized where, after expenses and a small payout to the administrators, any profit is redistributed back to the investors that also vote. A website could be put in place where the investors that vote could have a say in witness decisions (like upgrading, forking, etc.), so it becomes a representative of it's voting investor base. It could be on a cloud server and be transparent with a constitution. And likely other featured could be on the server and site to reward the investors as well.

Couldn't that be more abusive if we give people with alot of money more say into what the witness has to do?

The most representative way to do it would be to have every Steemian vote on everything, but that would never happen, hence witnesses. I think the most important thing is having a better platform for communicating and polling with the witnesses. We need a voting platform and political poll website where they can ask feedback from everyone with 25+ rep all equally representational in the vote to see who wants what. Minnows may all say no more voting bots, but whales may say yes, but there are many more of us so it would then be representational. However, with a rep limitation, whales could just flag one time on someone who they don't want voting and that could be super abusive too so maybe no rep limit or find a way around something like that. Ideally there would be a way to ensure it was only humans voting not bots, but not sure how

This sounds like an exciting project to explore how to effectively work with team witnesses, @omitaylor. Perhaps smart contracts with Etherium could be employed to distribute profits fairly among investors.