Hello Steemians, an issue has been discovered which is preventing delegations from functioning properly. Delegations require an account to have voting mana before it can delegate. This is done to prevent malicious actors from exploiting delegations to obtain more voting mana than an account should have.

Currently, the way the blockchain is checking downvote mana returns false negatives which causes it to “believe” that an account should not be allowed to delegate any Steem Power. The false negative only presents in cases involving accounts with unusually large Steem Power holdings, which is why the behavior was not exposed through testing.

New Steem Accounts

One example of how this impacts users is that when Steemit creates accounts for new Steem users, we delegate Steem Power to them so that they can use the blockchain. Due to this issue, Steemit cannot delegate to new accounts.

The logic governing delegations resides in consensus because delegations impact how people vote, which impacts how rewards are distributed. It is important that any logic which influences the distribution of tokens be immutable and decentralized. Because this requires a consensus change, and even though the changes are minimal, this means we have to perform another hardfork. Fortunately, the minimal nature of the changes makes them easily reviewable by the Witnesses.

Because this is preventing Steemit from creating new Steem accounts, and because we will likely not have the opportunity to hardfork again until the SMT hardfork, we believe that it is best to perform this hardfork as soon as possible. We have spoken with the Witnesses and come to a consensus that the best time to execute this hardfork is 11:00 AM EDT. Because this is another hardfork it will be named 0.22.0 (or Hardfork 22).

We do not expect the user experience on steemit.com to be impacted by this hardfork

Reward Distribution

Some users have reported bugs in rewards which we have also investigated. In some cases there may be some artifacting that is a result of Hivemind's brief lag, but this is not an issue with the blockchain itself. Some users have also reported that votes are not delivering the amount of rewards that they “should.” These reports do not appear to be due to a bug, but instead highlight a fundamental misunderstanding of how votes are meant to work on Steem that is the result of the linear reward system that operated inside #OldSteem.

The goal of Proof-of-Brain is to reward people who create high-quality content as determined by the crowd. Votes should only deliver rewards if the content is deemed valuable by other people. If someone votes on something that is not high-quality, the creator of the content should not receive any rewards. If someone casts the same vote on something that is high-quality, the creator of that content should receive rewards. The reward should not be determined by the vote, but by the quality of the thing being voted on.

Vote Worth

A “vote” is not “worth” anything. A vote is a signal of value and rewards should only be distributed if other people receive that signal and then amplify it by placing more votes on top of it. Under the linear rewards curve used in #OldSteem it didn’t matter what you voted on. That meant that it was easier to predict what a vote would be worth. But the problem was that it didn’t matter what you voted on. This is precisely the problem that the convergent linear reward curve was intended to solve; to make it matter again what you voted on.

On #NewSteem it matters what you vote on. That is Proof-of-Brain working.

The Steemit Team