Pay Attention, Curation Window Will Go from 30 to 15 Minutes!

Maybe you remember or you saw a post today announcing that tomorrow at 11am EST (that's New York time) Hard fork 20 code named Velocity will start.

^Source

It may go smoothly and you may be unaware of any change when it happens, or it can be a little rocky, and possibly something like a few days ago might happen, when we had the downtime.

Some changes of the new hard fork like the halved curation window to 15 minutes from 30 minutes now, will be immediately in effect, while others like the resource credits system, might take a few days or more to stabilize. Most likely the majority of users will not even be aware of this period needed for stabilizing, nor will it affect them.

At least that's my understand of how things will proceed.

If you forgot what HF20 Velocity is all about, I wrote some time ago about the most important changes HF20 introduces.

In today's post, I will insist on one of them, very simple so that everyone can understand.

Curation window halved from 30 to 15 minutes

In HF19 (now), a curator only receives 100% of the curation reward if s(he) curates after at least 30 minutes from the publishing time of a post. Curating earlier would mean to share part of the curation reward with the author, the sooner you upvote the more the author receives. If you upvote the post immediately after publishing, the author receives the entire curation reward, you as the curator - nothing.

It's actually more complicated than that, because curators are also incentivized to find and curate content early, because the order of curation also determines the amount of rewards you receive. And if high upvotes come after you but earlier than 30 minutes, it might be worth to share a portion of the curation rewards with the author.

Starting with HF20, which most likely will occur tomorrow at or a little after 11am EST (unless there isn't a super majority of Top 20 witnesses votes on it, which I doubt), the curation window changes from 30 to 15 minutes.

This is nothing complicated. It means that in HF20 after 15 minutes curator's reward is 100%, unlike in HF19, where it is 100% after 30 minutes, and after 15 minutes it is only 50%, and the rest of 50% goes to the author.

Now, for all curators out there, this is a very relevant piece of information.

If you are interested in maximizing you curation rewards (oh well, even if not maximizing them, but receive some curation rewards going forward), especially if you are new and don't understand the inner-workings of the Steem blockchain very well, it's important to act on this change. The sooner the better after HF20 happens.

This affects your manual curation too, although many (including myself) don't do the manual curation with the eyes on the clock. At least I do it when I find content I deem worthy of my upvote, without looking when it was posted, as long as it is during the payout period.

Automated upvotes on the other hand are another deal. They go to accounts of your choosing for different reasons:

• to support a friend or someone who engages with you on a regular basis
• to support a project you care about
• to follow a curation trail (again, with different purposes)
• for pure profit

And if one of the reasons include receiving a curation reward for your regular upvotes, then you need to adjust the delay for these upvotes to be on the 15 minutes mark or earlier, instead of 30 minutes mark or earlier.

If you are active every day or regularly, you find out of different changes that can affect your account's ROI and adjust immediately. Consequently, you don't lose money (rewards in our case), or better, earn more.

See you all on the other side of the hard fork! :)