The usual adage applies: "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." People who offer to sell you votes or buy your votes are up to something no good. People who request any access to your keys are definitely up to no good.

The witnesses are the people who run nodes to maintain the blockchain and develop improvements as needed. The top witnesses wield a lot of power. Anyone with an account can vote for up to 30 witnesses, and the more Hive Power you hold, the more weight your vote has.

Upvoting and downvoting influences post rewards, and along with re-blogging or re-posting in communities is what people mean by "curation." Some curation guilds also share daily best-of posts with excerpts and links.

Questions are fine. Ignorance is expected. It's like expecting a tabletop gaming n00b to know everything about character sheets, spells, turn actions, and old references to THAC0 immediately. that would be silly, and probably downright cruel. Harsh mockery will therefore commence in 3...2...1...