Sure, happy to. I'm copy/pasting info that I had used in another post on witnesses :) Let me know if you have further questions, and I'm happy to answer!

- The primary duty of a witness is to produce and sign blocks for the Steem blockchain. This is the way that everything happening in Steemit gets accurately recorded and tracked on the database that is distributed across all the Steem nodes.
- Witnesses are also elected leaders of the community. They have a responsibility to grow the Steem/Steemit community by using their skills/talents (as well as witness funds) in ways that benefit the community.
- They are the final deciders as to whether or not hard-forks occur. If there are controversial or bad changes being proposed, the witnesses can put a stop to them by refusing to pick up the new version.
- They also publish the price of Steem, which is used to determine the payout of SBD->Steem conversions, as well as the Steem marketcap - which determines the total amount of rewards available in the reward pool.

Well it was a bubble for sure. I think most people should have seen that (for example) making $44,000 on one blog post was not something that could be sustained long-term. I did still buy in some myself pretty much at the top though, and even to this day I do not regret the decision. I think what a lot of people are just starting to find out is that the July push was not the "product launch" but was mainly intended to raise a bunch of money so they could hire people and build out the infrastructure of the site and related projects. Eventually when the site is ready to go mainstream I still believe it will be STEEM to the moon! :)

I definitely would not consider you (or myself) a sucker though. We both saw the value this platform had to offer and considered it a good investment. We also assumed others would see the same, and the price would keep going up. 

> I can no longer support my family on it alone

It is really too bad. There were a lot of users that I saw were planning to use Steemit as a full-time income, and I really questioned it. The marketcap of STEEM is not that much yet, and we cannot afford to pay hundreds of people $30,000 to write about what their cats and hamsters are up to. You were one of the people that was really adding a lot of value to the platform though, so I always thought of you as one of our "full time employee" bloggers. I hope we get back to the point where you can be one again.

http://i.imgur.com/MAn3WWo.gif

"67". Working my way up :)

lol, I started by just typing 67. Good old markdown translated that into #1. I had to edit it to "67." :)

I would assume so. They have some additional info on their website. The user also hangs out in Steemit.chat, but I don't know how often he/she replies to messages. You could try asking for a tour :)

Haha, nice one :)