Any info on who the twelve validating witnesses are atm? I'm assuming they're just twelve servers being run by tonych, but curious if there is any more info available.
I think the plan is to vote for witnesses much like Komodo is doing at the moment to secure decentralization issue that you focused on in your past posts when comparing to XMR.
Maybe one of the more knowledgable guys can confirm?
The OP says the list of well known users called witnesses is defined by users themselves as they include the list in every transaction they post. I assume the most reliable nodes running for the longest, and with the most bandwidth are the twelve validating witnesses. Anyone can set up a node, and others besides tonych must already be running some.
The main chain is defined deterministically based on the positions of transactions in the graph. Refer to the white paper for details, but as a general rule, the MC gravitates towards transactions authored by well known users, which we call witnesses. The list of witnesses is defined by users themselves as they include the list in every transaction they post. The MC then follows the path within the DAG such that:
1. the witness lists of the neighboring transactions on the chain are either identical or differ by only one mutation,
2. the chain goes through the most number of witness-authored transactions, compared with alternative chains.
The above is very brief and sketchy description with many important details omitted, refer to the white paper for a full technical story.
Right, there are supposed to be twelve
well known users acting as witnesses, but there is a default list of witnesses that I'm presuming no one bothers to change. If they're so well known, then why doesn't anyone know who they are?
Here's a quote from the whitepaper:
Looking for a “reality test”, observe that some of the participants of our network are non-anonymous reputable people or companies who might have a long established reputation, or they are businesses interested in keeping the network healthy. We’ll call them witnesses.
It doesn't seem like anyone knows who these twelve well-known, non-anonymous people are, so I would tend to assume at the moment they are all just servers set up by tonych and set as the defaults.
We need more exchanges. we will do it 
