RE: Hardfork 20: What to Expect Tomorrow
So after the RC system goes live, the user experience will have to change and the new system will need time to reach a new equilibrium.
That being said, as the transition goes on, users will likely notice some changes in user experience, though it is difficult to predict what those changes will be.
But while the system is searching for equilibrium, the appearance of these phenomena might actually increase.
The changes in user experience should only last around 7 days. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know exactly how things will unfold as the system relies on unpredictable human feedback.
As with the RC system, there are a lot of unknowns with respect to how this will function IRL.
All of this is not very confidence-inspiring. If there is so much uncertainty and if these protocols are as important as is being claimed, why was the testing period not extended and the testnet not expanded until more reliable feedback could be obtained?
We're being asked to accept a hard fork with such a high level of uncertainty because one entity believes it will be "better." And then we're being told that witnesses ought to accept it and ought to set specific parameters...again, because one entity believes those parameters will be best for everyone, despite this same entity expressing such a low level of confidence about new user behavior and system feedback.
This is precisely why such large changes to the blockchain protocols should not be coupled with other protocol changes.
There is far too much variability when adding multiple changes at once, especially if the magnitude of the changes from one protocol could be so severe that you feel the need to issue multiple cautions/warnings to users.
Before I'm castigated once again...
I'm all for trying the RC system. I think it could be a viable solution for better allocating network resources - something I have been talking about for quite some time. But I believe that such a big change to the system ought to be more robustly tested and introduced to the blockchain by itself so that we can see more isolated and reliable feedback when it comes to user behavior. The level of uncertainty expressed in this post is worrisome, taking into account previous hard forks and large-scale user behavioral changes in the past - specifically following last year's hard forks.
This is certainly not the first time I've mentioned all of this and I'm certainly not alone on the matter. It would be nice if it were taken seriously one day by the Steemit, Inc. dev team.
You can see my previous commentary about HF20 here:
https://steemit.com/witness/@ats-witness/steem-hardfork-20-thoughts-on-velocity
Steemit itself is still in beta.
This reply to any questions or criticism is apparently still in beta as well.
Or, how about, Free "Mana"?
Clearly @ats-david was right to be concerned. We can all now see the implementation was botched and may have been avoided by taking the time to get one major change done right.
Careful buddy, you know how they get when we make wise and logical assertions based on our professional experiences in similar endeavors, that essentially get gas-lighted as "negativity" or "whining". I'll bring you a castigation trauma kit though, no smart man should be left on the battlefield alone. I've had just this sort of conversation with @inertia, over such things as the last breakdown, which looks like a dev left a local workbench test param in the code that made it all the way live. This is what #comments in code are for - "#following param should be reverted before deploy" and co-programming or peer review before typing git update and git commit, and git shit like that. But hey, basic entry level programming things like that were met with "peer reviews? that's the witnesses job." Okay, and I concede that ... to a point... but when there are dozens of undocumented changes (repeat need for comments in code) in a gazillion lines of code, I'd say it's kinda up to the code changing dev to at least make sure the changes can even be noticed for review.
So there's that.
To @inertia's credit though, my conversations with him, and his direct involvement in an improved test net, give me more confidence than I ever had in a steemit inc dev before his involvement there. He's wicked smaht.