So I am going to do something here that I, quite frankly, usually frown on. That is, taking a post from one of the big wigs (@ned, @dan, @steemitblog, @steemdev, etc) and parsing it for my followers. Typically I see the rush to put out reaction posts to announcements as a money grab for post rewards.
However, even though I resteemed the latest steemitblog post regarding HF20, I know I have a lot of new followers for whom this will sound like rocket science, so I wanted to put a few of the points into easily digested chunks. If you feel this is not a service to my followers, flag away, but I am going to try to make this as useful as possible.
If you missed the announcement, you can check it out in full here: Hardfork 20 Velocity Development update.
It's headlined by an awesome dude on a motorcycle. I don't have awesome dude budget, so I went and found this guy on pixabay. He's not as fast, but just as cool.
First Question.... What's a Hard Fork?
Good question Steve. (Who'se Steve? I dunno) In simple terms, a Hard Fork is like a new version. When you get software in version 2.0, 3.0 and so one, Blockchain gets Hard Forks. This Hard Fork is named Velocity, and is the 20th such occurrence for Steem. For those wondering about a timeline of the Hard Forks, you will have to look elsewhere, I dunno. I know that 19 happened in June, which means, just like most of you, I have not been here long enough to experience a Hard Fork, so this is new and exciting to me as well.
Let's take the changes one by one.
Changes to 30 minute Curation Window
Once upon a time, there was no window where it was "bad" to upvote a new post. You could go in and give your upvote and get all the curation rewards because you "discovered" great content. Then the bots arrived. And the bots were evil, and the bots voted all the cool stuff right away so they could collect massive curation rewards. The @ned did see the bots, and see that they were bad. So he got up on his high horse and rode over to the @steemitdev pavilion (a huge wind whipped tent right next to the most beautiful oasis in the desert) and asked his dev team what to do about the damned bots.
The dev team got their heads together and came up with a plan. If we make the curation rewards not so much for the first 30 minutes, then the bots all voting early won't get any reward, and the people who really read the posts will win!
The plan sounded good in theory, but no sooner had the curation curve been set, than the bot builders simply programmed their bots to vote later in the reward window. Ooops.
Rather than reverse course entirely, a new partial solution has been found. The new Hard fork will reduce the penalty window from 30 minutes to 15 minutes, making it easier for actual humans to vote on content when they find it instead of sitting to wait out a timer. This may help to an extent. But bot developers will be just as good at programming their bots to vote at 14 minutes as they were at 30.
I see this as a positive move, but a negligible change.
Eliminating Self-voting rewards through curation
In a move to try to lessen some of the advantage to self voting described here:
If authors vote for themselves right away, they get their author rewards, 100% of the curation rewards from their vote, plus a portion of the curation rewards coming from everyone who votes for the post after them.
Basically, while you can upvote yourself, you can't curate yourself. So the 25% of your vote that should go to curators WILL go to curators, and not back to you. This makes sense, and will hopefully drive people to go and vote on some things they didn't write and spread the reward pool out a bit.
This is a Good Change, though people who are used to upvoting themselves with 100% return will be disappointed.
Dust Vote Threshold Removal
This is a big one for newer accounts. Your vote, if worth less than a penny, is basically considered "dust" in the system. That's okay because even if you don't see the rewards change on a post you vote, it does in some miniscule way, which not only helps the author, but helps you with curation rewards to build up your account. However, as you vote more and more often, your portion of a penny gets smaller and smaller until it is effectively zero.
In the past when you reached this point of nil returns, you were disabled from voting. The system would reject your upvote, and you may not know the reason why. it would continue to do this until your Voting Power restored enough for your vote to have a value that could be applied to the post.
With the new change, you will be able to continue to vote to your heart's content. The system will recognize the vote and add it to the upvote tally. However, the Author will get no added reward, and you will earn no curation reward. But you do get the satisfaction of knowing your vote was counted.
I think this is good and bad. Yes, everyone likes to have their vote counted. But the effort should be more in the way of educating new users on Voting Power and the need to conserve it on some level. I did this when I started, I was voting everything under the sun and got in to the vote could not be tallied errors, I had no understanding until someone on Discord explained Voting Power to me. We need to teach people how it works, not just make it easy for them to blindly run around upvoting stuff with no effect. In fact, as I type this I like it less and less. If you think you are upvoting and earning curation, when in fact you are not, then you get more irritated that you have no curation rewards coming into your wallet. This is where we need to teach people rather than let them just flail in the system.
Application of Shift to all votes
This one has the most comments over on the blog post as of my writing. And frankly, I am not sure I can explain it very well. Basically, each vote will be shifted down by 1.219 SP. So if you have 100 SP, your vote weight will be 98.7% instead of 100%. I don't understand maths, but I understand the intent, and that is this;
There are vote spammers out there who give tiny votes to a lot of posts for curation rewards and visibility. Just visit the introduceyourself tag for examples of vote spammers. Then there is the "This post has received 1% appreciation" votes. If you have a slider (500 SP or higher) and you vote at 100% then the 1.219 SP reduction won't change much. But if you are voting 1000 times with 1% vote weight then that 1.219 SP will cancel out the majority of that 1% vote, reducing your curation and making it less palatable to vote spam as a way of increasing curation rewards.
Results on this may vary. The larger your account, the less you will notice this change I think, and I am not sure if it will discourage vote spammers even a little bit. We'll see.
Proof of work account mining vbia softfork
Proof of Work?!?! Wait! Steem is all about Proof of Stake! That's the whole point isn't it?
From mining you came, and to mining you shall return. In the early days there was a pre-mine for Steem, and that is how a lot of people got a lot of Steem early on. This is not that. What this sounds like to me is that miners will be in the system to mine fresh accounts for new people coming on board. This will effectively speed up the sign up verification process for (Hopefully) immediate sign up and account approvals. This will not happen right away in Hard Fork 20, but the road is being paved for it, and it will be added as a soft fork on top of HF20.
I kind of look at this like the people mining to help birth the cryptokitties. They are mining a specific portion of the blockchain to assist in a function and getting paid for it.
I'm pretty excited about the prospect of this, as I am in the process of building a little mining rig, and if I can point it at my favorite crypto, and do so profitably, I am down for sure!
Removal of Power Down Restriction
Up to now, an account had to have 10 times the account creation fee in Steem Power in order to be able to Power Down their Steem Power into Steem. This was put in place to prevent faucet abuse. From here on out, because the account creation fees will be "burned" (presumably to the miners) there is less financial reason for someone to create and then power down accounts. So the restriction is being removed, and if you want to power down 16 STEEM Power (as an example) you could do so.
Negligible impact as most users who are here to stay are doing anything but powering down.
Update to witness price feed format
I'm not a witness, if you are reading this, there is a good chance you aren't a witness, so this really doesn't mean much to us. But the last bit is a change to the rule on the Steem and SBD Witness price feed guidance, basically making all witnesses comply to something most of them already do anyway.
Result of the change: Witnesses gonna Witness. (i.e. I have no idea)
Conclusion
So basically, these changes are part of laying the groundwork for getting the blockchain ready for SMTs. There are a couple of changes here that will affect our daily user experience in ways that most of us won't REALLY notice unless we are watching for it. Hopefully, the biggest change we will see out of this is when mining for accounts comes into play and we can onboard our friends in a matter of minutes instead of days.
Insert fireworks and flowers of excitement here. In fact... let me do that for you...
We'd certainly prefer those fireworks to ones like this:
Thanks for reading! I hope you found the information useful! Let me know in the comments if you have questions, and I will do my best to come up with answers for you!
shrewd indeed. nice consolidation write up. i am a bit out of the loop due to working on slothicorn development....
i like that name... slothicorn
You keep on keeping on with the Slothiness! I will try to keep my ear to the ground and will let you know if anything really news worthy happens. hahaha
This is war... So the bots are going down???
No. Sorry... Bots will not be going down, to my knowledge. But if they do not adapt to the new 15 minute reward curve, hopefully human curators will get more of the reward than the Bots do. This is more of an action to (probably) limit the rewards being collected by "sleeping whales" who have set up some form of curation trail to vote at 25-30 minutes. Now human curators will have a window to get their vote in before those big automatic votes come in and get some curation reward out of it.
The biggest edge that humans have against bots is the connections they can make with other users. Bot's usually can't do that very well.
You are shrewd.
Thanks for the breakdown pal. In all honesty, I'm still trying to understand parts on this platform and I find It very helpful :)
Well I am happy to try to answer specific questions if you have any. Feel free to comment with them and let me know what I can do to help. I know there is a LOT to grasp.
One thing you might want to do is check out This Post which is full of links to helpful posts for different things around steem. It may prove useful to you!
These all sound great.
I would like to see the 7 day limit on author/curation/comment rewards go away. It should gradually decrease over time, but I think many old articles that are very well written are not paid attention to because there is no way to earn off of them. It is still possible to comment/upvote to get visibility on these old posts. Further, authors are discouraged from fixing up old posts because they receive little reward for doing so.
That's a difficult bridge to cross. If you leave rewards open, do you also then delay payout? What do you set payout back to? For a lot of people I think they wish payout came earlier than the 7 days as it is. You have to walk a tight rope here with respect to the reward pool.
The author payouts could be every 3 days with a minimum of something like 0.001 Steem value.
I didn't read it all, but noted some good points, ty. "changes are part of laying the groundwork for getting the blockchain ready for SMTs", sounds solid. So when is 20 happening, approximately?
They did not give an exact time frame, though they did say the release candidate would be ready for the first of the year. Then they have to get all of the witnesses to upgrade their servers once they provide the release candidate to the witnesses for execution.
Soon is really the best answer I can give you on that one.
That Steve is a troublemaker u.u xD
Thanks for writing this article or I would have never notice ;)
Resourceful as always! Thanks for update, good read!
Thank you for the layman's review...and saving us from reading the rocket science!
I consider myself up to date on the upcoming changes now. <3
hahaha. Don't take my word for it! I am not exactly a professor in Steemiology! I HOPE I covered all the bases. But I could have gotten some of it wrong.
Well...I still figure you can't have got it terribly wrong ;)
Thanks for all of this... I'm not sure who would flag you because I didn't know any of this was happening and if I did know I most certainly wouldn't understand it.
I don't feel like any of these changes would really affect me one way or another, but the main thing I got from this hilariously fireworked article is what a hard fork was... in my head I thought it was where someone took a copy of the open source code and went in an entirely new direction... I didn't realize it was just a new version number... slightly disappointed but much more informed.
Thanks for this!!
Well it just seems like every time a new update comes out EVERYBODY posts basically a copy of the update to try to earn some rewards. I think this is just barely a shade under plagiarism honestly. But I tried to put my own spin on it so that it felt more unique. Cheetah didn't come by, so maybe I'm okay. haha
As to the forking, what you describe is also a hard fork. So it gets complicated. The hard fork you are talking about is more when groups of individuals disagree about the hard fork and instead of the entire blockchain taking the hard fork, you have one group who take the hard fork and one group who stay on the old version, thus creating two different chains.
For Steem this is really a big key to your Witness voting. A Fork cannot be implemented until the Top 20 witnesses upgrade to the new version. Period, end of story. 19 witnesses updated? Sorry, we're still on version 19. So if any of the Top 20 witnesses were to go dormant, we would be stuck until we managed to rally the vote to knock them out of a top 20 position for someone who will take the new version.
In theory Steem could Hard Fork into two versions I suppose.... but I don't know the technical side of that.
Wellllllllll, us noobs don't follow those everybodys... I can't speak for all newbies but we only care about words that are simple and gifs that are amazing.
I actually did some research after writing this comment and yes, came to the conclusion that I wasn't wrong... but I wasn't aware that forking was also regarded as a new version. Thanks for that.. it had been skewing my reading of cryptocurrency updates.
In the event that Top 20 witnesses do go dormant, what happens then? Surely enough whales would request the community to update their witness votes and/or vote someone new in. I've only used 5 votes so far, so I'm sure there are heaps of people that could make significant change with some guidance.
I expect at some point there will be at least another version of Steem... if it becomes massive and a hugely influential social media platform, I'm sure the Googles, CNNs, Disneys would want their own platform where they can control the votes better.
Well for news about the platform, the important follows are @ned, @sneak, @steemitblog, @steemdevs. If you want to follow the other creator who is no longer part of the project then @dan and @dantheman are accounts to follow too.
Witness voting is tied in to how much SP you have, so ultimately, our votes as minnows don't mean a whole lot. Here is how the voting looks for the top 50 witnesses. This chart is from steemreports.com:
Those Big Dark Blue Lines are the voting power of @freedom who pretty much can single handedly make or take Top 20 status to or from a witness. the @freedom vote is proxied to @pumpkin, so Pumkin is doing the witness voting for freedom. Pumpkin is an active witness vote changer, so if a Top 20 really went dormant, he or she would lose that @freedom vote in a hurry.
The light blue at the end encompasses ALLLLL the rest of us. So when we combine a lot of minnows, we can be as powerful as Freedom, so I am not trying to say our votes don't count. But when it comes to removing a top 20 witness, there are a few people who have to see it and take action on it and that witness will be demoted in a hurry.
Hope that helps!
Ah.
This might be the most incredible response to a question ever.
This is extremely helpful, I had no idea any one person had so much power... but it's also probably a good thing too... I'm glad quick action can be taken if required. I've learnt so much about this platform and yet I still make huge leaps and bounds in my Steem-knowledge every day.
They might take our @pumpkin, but they will never take our @freedom!
I wrote this there and i repeat it here:
Few words...
I think this will create a sort of iniquity.
The splitting up of big upvote is better of a 100% upvote to a lucky author (Perhaps his friend).
well, there is iniquity already established in the existing system. I don't think that this rule is intended to make us vote at 100% all the time, I think the intent is to make it less profitable for a whale to send out 1% votes on 1000s of posts a day in order to collect curation rewards.
Some of these accounts that they are trying to discourage have Voting Power Percentages down in the 30% range, and even though their vote power at 100% would be huge, at a certain point it becomes tiny. By making this reduction, eventually those votes become dust and the profit goes away.
I think (and this is conjecture, nothing more) that the effort is to make people be more focused on what they vote on for curation rewards rather than simply having the shotgun effect of voting everything and see what you catch.
I'm still not convinced, but time will tell who's right ;-)
Thanks for your answer.
I'm with your thinking here. Great write up Mike btw!
If Whales are encouraged to not split their vote, then to me this is going to mean less votes going round to folks who at present they might 'stick a small one on' because they had a bit of SP spare for the day.
My pessamistic view of the above is, Steemvoter doing overtime when the top 500 accounts' posts hit 15 minutes, and less for everyone else.
We shall see...
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hi @mikepm74
Thank you so much for the summarised version of HF20.
I too disagree on dust vote threshold removal.
this will increase blind upvoting.
However I though do not spam votes but I do like to control my upvote percentage to support wider range of supporting good contents of my fellow peers; so I am not certain the lower VP is a good call.
upvoted
Thank you sir for this clear guide.
I see other issues in the system as well.
There are whales who upvote support users in a specific area and ignore others. Im juat concerned since I thought the platform was about making good content and getiing reward due to curation. But since some whales and even witnesses support people according to other criteria such as their relative level of acquaintance with each other, this forces minnows to stick up to these money making whales. All im saying is it is quite unfair to see the big guys help out the big guys. Now whats left for minnows is nothing. What's more is that this further decreases their motivatiom to make content simply because good content wasn't rewarded in the first place.
I may just be frustrated or self entitled. I dont know. But i do believe that curation is subjective. I just want that subjectivity to be fair and distributed equally to users. Lol
But about your post. I see no problem with the new guidelines. It looks pretty solid and the win actually goes to humans and not the bots.
This war between bots amd humans sound like something off a blockbuster hit lol. But yes I understand the new system and I couldnt agree more. Thanks for making it simple to the newbies here