The HardFork 17 rc 2 (release candidate 2) of the Steem blockchain was released and it's available for testing locally. There is even a recommendation for all witnesses to test this locally before launching it, on March 14, which is exactly what I'm going to do.
But before that, let's see what to expect, based on what the release notes are telling. The text quoted is copy/pasted identically from the release notes. I selected only 7 points, which seemed more interesting / impactful to me, but there are more changes, you can read about all of them if you want, there is a link at the end of the article.
1. No More Penalties For Posting More Than 4 Times A Day
Posting rewards are no longer penalized for posting more than 4 times in 24 hours. Originally this was implemented to reduce the impact of bots posting junk content. Ultimately it ended up hurting legitimate authors.
Pretty self-explanatory. Now you can post multiple times and, if your content is appreciated, you can earn accordingly.
2. Rewards Will Have Only A 7 Days Payment Window
99% of votes are cast in the first 7 days after creation. This elimates the need for a second payout to accumulate value to a post and simplifies logic significantly.
Until now, there was a reward window in the first 24 hours (more or less) and then another 30 days window. This will now change into one week. I see this having a significant impact, especially in the beginning. It may very well increase engagement.
3. The Actual Value Of Rewards Will Be Determined On A 30 Days Window
All payouts now look at the prior 30 days of payouts to determine the share of the reward rather than the current pending rshares.
This has something to do with the small variation in rewards you observe during the day. Starting with HF17, the time window won't be limited to the pending rshares, but to the previous 30 days. In the release notes, the potential impact of this measure is described as follows:
With this change, payouts will initially dip and then ramp up over the next 30 days until the reward fund reaches a steady state.
4. Rewards Have Their Own Balance
Again, self-explanatory, all your earnings will go into a separate balance and you have to claim them before being able to use them.
5. Arbitrary Split Of Rewards
All content can now specify beneficiaries to receive a part of their author rewards.
That's what I consider to be the most important change of this HF and a potential game changer. It will impact primarily the app builders, which may see bigger rewards for increasing the ecosystem, but also regular users who can easily divest their rewards into different accounts.
6. Delegating Steem Power
Steem Power can now be delegated to other accounts.
This is, again, big stuff. It will help a lot with new voting guilds and / or communities.
7. No More Mining, Hurray!
PoW has been broken for a long time. Very few people pay attention to it. It is dominated by the same few people and is providing very little value to Steem. Instead of investing even more time fixing it, we have decided to remove it entirely.
This change wins the second place after the arbitrarily split of rewards, in terms of potential growth. Once people will understand that getting Steem is a matter of supporting the platform (by creating content or being a witness in a DPOS system) then everything will be much easier to understand.
This list is not exhaustive, you can see all the release notes here.
All in all, HF 17 will be a very important milestone in the life of Steem/Steemit community. Really looking forward to it!
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
For me, the big one is comments are now independent of posts, and there's no tree limit. I hope the Steemit.com UI has no nesting limits from day 1. And of course, the 38% reward pool going to comments.
Hardfork's almost certainly not going to be 14th March. They give at least one week from when the Hardfork is proposed. My best guess is they will release the final build (pending bugfixes) on 14th March, with the hardfork happening on 21st March. The same thing happened with HF15, I think, where they delayed it in the last moment without communicating the change.
I wasn't aware of #4 - will check it out!
Yes, I forgot about the 38% going directly to comments, it will support engagement as well.
Also, I agree, it looks a bit difficult to make it on March 14th, but we will see.
I'm not sure this will massively affect adoption of Steemit, but I hope it makes things clearer to users. It's still a pretty complex system. We need some good guides and FAQs.
Upgrades like these are not meant to be killer features, but to slowly build the foundation that Steem ecosystem needs to be able to serve millions of users.
Agree.
Agree, we need a lot more customer management and marketing operations in this business. But at least engagement should increase.
You are so right ! I totally agree 😍👍
Sounds good @dragosroua! Bring them on!
My thoughts exactly :)
yeah kinda exciting isn't it ;)
Kudos! Question, our deposits into Steem and Steem Power are legitimate balances right? Meaning your not going to wipe the data after beta right? Or should I not deposit serious money into stern yet?
The blockchain will never get wiped no. The beta part mainly applies to the Steemit website, not the blockchain itself.
The reward balances being talked about in this update are just a way to ease the processing requirements of the steem nodes, they won't affect your balances.
I don't think this change will impact the current balances.
Potential usecase: users can send part of their rewards to charitable organizations.
Yep, I was thinking at the same thing. I did quite a lot of fundraising with my ultrarunning and I can see a very good use case here. All posts dedicated to a specific ultra that I want to run may have all their rewards dedicated to a specific charity. It's really convenient.
Some interesting insights - 2 questions @dragosroua
Namaste!
Thanks mate!
You're welcome :)
Thanks for breaking it down. I understand a lot more now :)
You're welcome.
Downvoted to counteract the bots and other whales.
More info here: https://steemit.com/test/@abit/whales-no-up-voting-test
This post was written and published BEFORE the experiment, @abit!
I supported your test and I even wrote a post that you should have written, letting people know about what's going on, but I think you're drastically overdoing it, man.
You're the one telling me that I'm no developer, but you're implementing the sloppiest test I've ever seen, with no methodology, no metrics, no rules. Just downvoting as you see fit, without any rule. How would you measure the impact of your test, if you're downvoting posts published before you started the test? What's the time window of the test? What's the methodology? How will you measure the results?
Please give me a decent answer to those questions, otherwise I will consider you've gone completely bonkers.
Do you realize you prolonged the payment window of this post by 8 more hours? Do you really have any idea about what you're doing? What the actual fuck?
big changing!
Forgive me. Can someone please explain in noobish lingo what no.3 and 4 really mean?
Have you seen a little variation in the value of rewards during the day, sometimes going up a little, sometimes going down? That variation is calculated based on a 24 hours window taking into account the remaining number of rshares in the reward pool. In HF 17 they will calculate it based on a 30 days window, which will probably make the variations slower. Also, in the beginning the rewards may seem a bit smaller but they will increase soon after.
There will be another account in your wallet, where all your rewards will be sent and you will have to claim them, to move them into your "checking" account.
Thanks. That's s really cool to know.
So my rewards will no longer go 100 % to steem power say !? But into a wallet first !? Then I move it to where I want after that like to steem power and steem dollars !? Sorry just trying to understand !
As far as I understand, all rewards will go into a separate account, from where you will have to claim them. I think this applies only to rewards in Steem and SBD, the part of the rewards that is in Steem Power will go directly to the Steem Power account. It's not clear from the release notes, but I think we'll see soon how it's going to be implemented.
Thanks ! I sure hope its not complicateing things even more ! Lol ! 😍👍
So glad theres going to be no penalty for posting more then 4 times in 24 hrs ! So we will still get paid in 24 hrs !? And then in 7 days instead of 30 days !? This is much better and makes more sence ! I dont quite understand #4 , or some of the rest of this , but im sure it will be explained more clearly once its actually implemented ! Thanks so much @dragosroua for the preview ! Im really hopeing this will make things easier to understand and bring more people to the platform ! 👍😍🐳
No payment after 24 hours. There will only be one payout period which will be one week. For me what that means is I don't have to curate every day. I can come and read a post from 4 days ago and I can still vote on it which is nice.
Well that part of it I like too ! And i guess after a while if your posting all the time , daily , your still being paid every day , as the weeks start going by 🤔
Exactly. Thinking about it though, were probably the only blogging website where the users blog every day lol. It's very unusual for somebody to write more than one blog post per week so maybe this would normalise that a little bit for newcomers.
Agree. I've never written so much in my life until I joined Steemit. lol
I'm happy too, but the payment will be done only once, 7 days after posting, not once after 24 hours and then again after 6 days.
This i dont understand !? So it will first take 7 days for the first pay out , and then 6 days after that so in 13 days there will be a second pay out !? I dont like this at all !! 🤔👎
Nope: one payout after 7 days. Every post will be paid after 7 days. Nothing after that.
Humm!? I dont think i like that very much yet !?🤔👎
In my experience, I hardly had any upvote after 7 days. So not too much too lose. On the other hand, knowing that you can engage people for more than 1-2 days and still get paying upvotes can lead to higher rewards, if you know your game.
Will need sometime to adjust but first off the 4 post limits removed probably means a lot more post from some people - not saying it's good or bad but I may also do more than 4 if I feel the need to.
I don't know that numbers 3-4 are KISSable... I don't really understand the point of them...
Hopefully somebody can explain the benefits.
Number 3 might be very interesting. As I understand it, it will create a more stable reward fund.
But what's the point in number 4? Is it to do with delegating post rewards? What happens to rewards that are not claimed?
That I don't know.
I'm also kinda skeptical of delegated voting being a good thing. It would make sense if I could give away 30 out of 40 of my vote limit since I don't vote 40 times per day. But delegating the power seems to reduce the demand to power up.
Great work! Thank you!