One note from me:
You listed in "Falling Behind! Please Update Your Nodes!" witnesses running nodes not only with version v0.16.0 but also with versions v0.16.1 and v0.16.2 (includes my own) and that is wrong.
The latter two are not a consensus altering releases (only affects API serving nodes and read-only nodes) so there is no difference for witnesses running v0.16.3 vs v0.16.2 or v0.16.1.
I am running v0.16.1 on my witness node and v0.16.3 on my seed node and full node + on some backup / supporting nodes.
I am also running v0.17.0 which I support as mentioned in my witness log (being neutral in worst case), currently delaying switch after reading: Patience with the Hardfork - There Must Be Consensus.
Additional notes:
There's no real opposition to the features you wish for, and they will hopefully soon be available with HF17.1
The majority of the witnesses and steemit agree that changes need to be discussed better, and ominous omnibus bills are not the style we want have this run. Businesses should be able to wait a couple of weeks, until the bigger community came to an agreement.
The missed blocks number is an all-time count. Maintenance is necessary when it grows, not depending on its size.
Thanks for catching that!
I'll update the chart right now.
Obviously I do urge you to move to 17.0 though, because it's the lack of witnesses supporting it that are keeping it from becoming consensus and as an omnibus I think we can agree there are wins for everyone.
I am one of those witnesses that are aware of some issues regarding this release, but I do not consider them as "grave". However, delaying HF a bit would not be a big deal if that is necessary for reaching a better consensus. Think of it as ordering a pineapple pizza. ;-)
exactly
Nice post! I upvoted it. I think the more witnesses we can get to update and the more users we can get to switch over their votes, the faster we will reach consensus.
I think the real problem is we have numerous witnesses who have just gone asleep at the wheel. Waking them up and also letting the ones who aren't asleep but who are afraid to speak against the louder voices know that "hey this is a good thing for everybody. There's something in here for you, no matter what your plans are for steem". Is essential to making this consensus happen.
Judging by the massive amounts of conversations I participated in with about 15 of the 19 top witnesses, no one is asleep at the wheel and everyone chipped in the discussion.
There were two main sticking points that overwhelmingly caused some of us doubt:
Now, whether or not you personally feel those are reasons to delay the other features, well that's up to you to decide. We asked for HF17 to include everything (including the awesome stuff you listed out above in your post) with these two features temporarily removed. We can then have a discussion about those two features, and may or may not support including them in a future release.
There's no malice or laziness in how we approached all of this. We all want what's best for steem, and while our opinions may differ, there's very likely always a compromise that can be reached. I personally am pretty proud at the hours of conversation and polling that happened, and how well the witnesses came together to discuss these issues.
@jesta I can respect this point of view. Keep in mind that the purpose of this post is to let people know that if they want the changes from HF17 to go through, they need to vote witnesses that will support it.
I think the change to comment rewards and the change to a 7 day payout are wrong, but I'm willing to accept them as a concession to the other features that do make steem an attractive business proposition.
This isn't meant to be a name and shame for anyone running 0.16 and above. But it is there to highlight who is supporting what.
The comment reward pool could really be the best or worst thing. We don't know. It's true that making it a parameters could help us determine what are the impact of such a pool.
I won the whale vote contest - watch out! Good things coming!
I urge you to update your post to remove misinformation. :) The 0.17.0 release will not hard fork the network. Although as of now, if you don't have your sources from a previous build, 0.16.x can't be built because a necessary repository was removed.
Edit: 0.16.x may be available on Github again soon.
Edit2: I've downvoted this post because I don't believe Steem should reward misinformation about itself. I also find the ranking of the witnesses has been tailored in a meaningless way to put yours on top. Missed blocks is only a useful statistic when compared to the number of successfully created blocks.
Further, as @gtg said, the versions 0.16.2 and 0.16.3 have no impact on running a witness node. 0.17.0 is functional but will not hard fork the network, which requires 17 non-miner witnesses running it in a round after 21 March 2017 15:00:00 UTC to switch over. As only witnesses below the top 19 are running it, there can only be one 0.17.0 DPOS node per round, in the backup slot.
@pfunk The ranking was not meaningless in anyway. It was sorted by version, then by missed.
That's not a meaningless number, whether it is cumulative over the life of the witness or not, it's there. If a better way is ratio of missed to found, so be it, but that would have required additional calculations and I simply pulled the data in raw and did a sort.
Yes it's a comparison of my node vs the others. But that's because we support HF 17 while many others do not.
The question is how many actually don't want the changes and how many are on just still on autopilot? Our participation rate isn't exactly the greatest lately.
Also why are people still voting for nodes running 0.15 or 0.14 those nodes are not generating valid blocks, so in that way it is a wakeup call.
Additionally, the only say many people have in the day to day operations of this place is their witness vote. They should make sure they're still voting for witnesses that still represent what they steem to be.
This isn't misinformation. It's factual and based on the correct reading of the data. At the time of my post there were not enough non-miner witnesses to make HF 17 happen and I wanted to let people know who is and who is not running it and maybe wakeup some of the people who were opposed and invite them to see it from a different perspective.
I also wanted to explain why I changed out all my votes, and how people can use the proxy function to vote and why.
If even on person learned something new, then I've done my job as a witness here.
I just don't see the reason for the downvote. But you're entitled to vote your conscience.
I thought I explained it pretty well. You can see who responded to the survey as shown in liondani's post and the turnout was remarkably good for being done during the weekend.
Misinformation:
This ignorant statement combined with the features you listed before it is insinuating that the top of the (actual, stake weighted, not arbitrarily ordered) witness list are against these features. The changes are not the ones at issue.
More misunderstanding, confusion:
If the nodes were still running after the previous hardforks, they were forked off. Nobody made a new block past the hardfork time. They are all gone, and only listed on witness ranking lists because they have approval votes for them still. Dan used that account presumably to test the witness plugin in new versions of Steem. The version is not an indicator of the node still running, it's just the version of Steem that last produced a valid block.
More ignorance:
There is not one witness I know of who does not want to upgrade to a reasonably featured HF17. This means no comment pool, for the most part, and abuse mitigation of the 7 day payout.
The top end of the witness list are trying their best to make Steem the best it can be. You're not helping that with this post.
Right so like I said, why are people still voting for them? Are they aware that they are still voting for them? Hopefully this post woke them up and reminded them.
Which is not the same thing as supporting it in it's current incarnation and that is the point I am trying to get across.
Sure top witnesses got together and decided collectively not to accept this but to accept a subset of HF17 if SteemIt Inc decides to go that route, but I'm not seeing anything from Steemit Inc endorsing that viewpoint. In fact did anyone notice the image @steemitblog used in their post on the subject? It's a dog being trained to stay with a cheeto on it's nose. Does that not tell you anything?
Frankly I like the comment pool and the abuse mitigation thing seems to my mind an edge case that can be worked out at a later date. But my voice as a witness is drown out in the cacaphony because even though I'm spending the same amount of money each month on hardware/software to run a witness, I don't yet have enough stake to be in the top tier and thus doesn't matter and yes you literally just said that.
You're also saying the top witnesses collectively decided they don't like the comment pool. But where's the user's voice in this? The people who are actually impacted by this, the people who use the site and comment?
Frankly I believe that this posting helps witnesses overall, because logically the only way to be a top witness is to support the vision of steem the majority want to see. Right now that's an economic majority, but eventually this will be a simple majority as the distribution smooths out. So why not let people know about these issues?
Now people are aware there was even a process to make a decision like that and that they can vote for witnesses who support(ed) the features they wanted to see.
I'm not wrong here, I'm just in the minority of opinion in terms of our stake weighted voting system.
Updated the chart!
Thank you.
Very welcome! Thanks for your patience!