Increased Voting Power Precision Will Come With The Next Hardfork - Tackling Growth Pains
Voting in the Steem ecosystem is based on a few variables.
One of them is voting power, and, in the current implementation, it is set to decrease with 10% for every vote at full power it allows only 10 full power votes per day.
Which brings us to the following situation: if someone has only 2% voting power left, AND sets his voting power at 2%, what happens?
In the current "under the hood" implementation, the way these numbers are rounded are capping the total votes in the above scenario at 2000k per day.
If you're a regular John Doe, this is more than enough. But if you are using the platform at a deeper level, this comes up as a limitation. It's like the numbers are too coarse to let you fine tune your thing.
If you're wondering who needs this amounts of votes per day, let's just think at a brand new app built on top of the Steem blockchain, like eSteem, chainBB or busy. All of these are actually acting like a thin governance layer on top of their own user base and, if they want to support their users with "dust" votes, they're limited in the current implementation. Another use case are spam fighting bots, which need to deploy an immense amount of activity (read: voting) to cope with hundreds of thousands of spam comments.
So, for the next hardfork (I presume it will be 0.20.0) there is a new proposal to increase the precision of how voting power is calculated. This change won't affect the algorithm itself, the vote power depletion will continue at the same rate, but it will create the ability to cast way more votes at very low voting power, allowing for more control in situations like the ones described above.
While this, again, won't affect regular users, it is a clear sign of "growth pains" that are tackled now by the Steem developers.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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@dragosroua I love the consistent Updates you give us about STEEMIT. Congrats also on Bitcoin $10,000 USD !
Sounds like it could be really useful in some cases. Regular users will have enough wiggle room with the 1-100% votes, but I can definitely see how this could be a necessary change for things like spam bots in your example!
I can definitely see how that fine tuning would be useful if you operate an app that's basically just a "skin" on the Steemit front end.
Hmm, that makes sense to be honest. In Order to keep the big fish in the game you need to be able to act like a big fish and keep up with all the minnows.
This will be awesome for the whales and might evern present a trend in new growth because the whales might be encouraged to vote more. With more people being added to the server because more whales are voting on their content. Maybe a lot of these new people with still around and like the community here on Steemit.
I would almost bet that this will be one of the greatest hard forks Steem has seen.
Yes, I agree with you abut the importance of it. But I think it's beyond the whale concept, the size of this precision actualization will be at the industrial level. It will probably create some sort of mega-whales. But yes, it's a very interesting situation that is tackled now.
A mega whale you say... Hmm, now that would be interesting. Possible to see a lot of growth from this fork. We will see soon I am sure. Who knows maybe it will bring attention from even bigger people than we already have.
I thought that each 100% upsteem reduces 2% of voting power.
This is a bit confusing for me, do you mean someone sets his voting weight at 2%? Because, you can't change your voting power manually.
What I meant is that you can have only 10 full power votes per day (as far as I know).
No, you can't change your voting power manually. The situation described is when somebody is already at 2% and sets their votes at 2%. Hope now is more clear.
Yep, it's clear now.
So theoretically, it would only take me 30 seconds (1 upsteem/3 seconds is allowed) to completely drain my voting power. That's interesting, I should test this using steem-python.
new user blindly upovtes. therefor they loose voting power very quickly.
after 500 sp you can
Ah, there seems to be a conflict in terminology. After 500 SP, you can change your vote weight whereas voting power is controlled by the steem blockchain and is consumed after every vote.
my wrong , sorry i thought i understood... Back to start :-)
Your articles are always informative yet crisp. Keep up the good work. We are reading!
Thank you!
Well, the reason is justified in your writeup.
Really this is an informative article for us. I check out the link. Thanks for sharing.
this is very good steem post
Thank brother.................it's informative!