Updates of HF 20 I Am Very Excited About

Hard Fork 20 is the most anticipated update of STEEM Blockchain in my opinion. My opinion might be biased as I was not here when HF 19 was released.

Here are some of the upcoming update, tweaks, or features I am excited about:

• Discount Account Creation

Currently, Steem Inc. creates an account with a balance of 0.100 SP plus 14.9 SP delegation. This account creation with delegation won't be present on HF 20. There will be a daily fixed number of credits to create free accounts with. If that credit is exhausted, no free account can be created. Witnesses will set the minimum fee like what we have now, but we do not need to multiply that by 30. Witnesses will provide the actual creation fee and with each new account, that fee will be burned.

• Curation Reward From Early Voting Will Go Back To Reward Pool

If we vote earlier than 30 minutes, our lost curation reward goes to the author. Many bid bot users take this opportunity to gain more SP by buying votes within 5 minutes of posting.

From HF 20 lost curation reward will go back to reward pool, but 30 minutes will be changed to 15 minutes.

• No Reward Pool Gaming by Cycling Delegation

Users now can game the reward pool by using delegation cleverly and earn about 42% more. Let's assume, I have 100K SP and I upvoted all my posts and comments of one of my friends until I reached to 0% VP. Then I delegate to my friend and he upvoted all my contents until he reaches to 0% VP. I can undelegate, and receive my SP back in 5 or 6 days. My VP will be 100% and we can start the cycle again. More details are here.

• Expiration of Market Orders

If we place an order in Steemit's internal market it doesn't expire, but from HF 20 each unfilled order will expire in a maximum of 28 days.

• Implement RC bandwidth system

It was explained in this blog post from Steem Inc. This may reduce the spamming happening on the blockchain.

• Removal of Minimum SP required to Power Down

There was minimum SP requirement of 10x of account creation fee to prevent immediate power down from new account. From HF 20 account creation fee will be burned so the minimum requirement is not required.

• Removal of 20s Cooldown Between Comments

20 seconds delay is changed to 3s. This may help upvoting bots other bots who also comment on posts they upvote.

More information can be found in the HF 20 Project and in Pull Requests.

^{Top image credit: Pixabay.com}