What is excellent about HF20?
We have a date! After over a year of waiting we finally have a scheduled release date. Fantastic!
The date has been announced with ample lead time for everyone to prepare. Not only that but the actual code release has been scheduled for a full month before the fork. I feel strongly that in a blockchain ecosystem with many users there should be a very healthy amount of lead time for updates. This hasn't always been done in the past but it is being done this time. Wonderful!
The new resource credit (RC) system is revolutionary, cutting edge work that is leading the entire blockchain industry! As noted in the @steemitblog post, there are only a few blockchains which function without transaction fees. Doing so while protecting against abusive spam or low value bloat is a difficult unsolved problem and Steem is leading the way here. We can't really know if this solution will fully solve the problem until it has been battle tested, but the direction is very promising and has a lot of built-in flexibility to incrementally improve if needed. You can read more about the RC system in previous @steemitblog posts here and here. Brilliant!
Discounted account creation. I'm a little less excited about this as I don't really think paying a few dollars to create a permanent account on a blockchain is a big problem (quality customer acquisition usually costs a lot more than that). However, I know various apps are excited about it so I hope it works out for them and doesn't just become another vehicle for abusive account farming. Verdict: wait and see.
Many small improvements, tweaks and fixes. Did I mention that we have a release date? After over a year of collecting code improvements, the list is impressive even if none is revolutionary on its own, and these will finally be going into deployment. Also promising is that fact that a number of these are community contributions, showing that the development is becoming more decentralized. Excellent work by both the Steemit and contributing community developers who made all of these updates possible!
What do you think is excellent (or perhaps not quite excellent) about HF20?
All author rewards from this post (SBD, STEEM and/or SP) will be contributed to @burnpost (powered up for anti-abuse downvoting initiatives and eventually burned).
For me, The major improvement about this hard fork is that other frontends and apps will be able to onboard new users themselves instead of having to rely on Steem inc to verify them all (if they don't pay).
I expect this to speed up signups across the board and an influx of new accounts.
And because it costs apps/frontends resources to sign them up it will give them incentive to do a good verification job.
I really like voting mana, which they undersold even further in this update than they have before.
What I find not-so-excellent is the overall approach which prioritizes punishing undesirable behaviors rather than making things better for anyone. The idea that you can "improve user experience" by allowing new users to vote and not telling them that it won't count for anything is deeply troubling on an attitude level even if the actual effect is almost too tiny to care about.
Similarly the focus on killing off the way that early vote curation goes to authors without finding anything good to do with the money that's going in that direction now is troubling. I can see the desire to remove that functionality, but the choice to "return the excess to the pool" is a very bad way to go about things and is going to cause all sorts of unintended weird behavior.
And underselling voting mana falls in with this, as they keep acting like it's there to solve a couple of obscure bugs no one cares about when in fact it's a serious upgrade to the voting system.
That is a good point. It would probably be better to make this more obvious, perhaps via some sort of 'leveling up' gamification when the user approaches and then reaches the point where their vote starts to count.
I can't agree here, though I do agree there might be unintended consequences. Returning to the pool just means that all payouts will be proportionately larger as a result (the increase will be slightly more to curators overall). All of the money in the pool gets paid out to someone.
This is a vast oversimplification. What actually happens for everything that is "returned to the pool" is that it inflates the value of everyone's vote proportionally to their stake. (Each rshare becomes worth more of the rewards pool.)
Whenever that happens, it broadens the equity gap, makes whales and bidbots more powerful relative to everyone else, and exacerbates most of the perceived problems on Steem. That's where most of the self-voting and circle-jerk and bidbot profit comes from, and it's at least part of why Trending is constantly full of crap.
"Returned to the pool" in the guise of @steemit's declined stake and other smaller factors is already a pretty big problem and HF20 is just going to make it larger.
'Inflating the value of everyone's vote' makes no sense when the value (reward pool STEEM per rshare) is variable not fixed (as a function of the amount of voting and somewhat the schedule of actual payouts), and it can't increase any 'equity gap' because the value is the same for everyone.
The pool will reach a new equilibrium with slightly more going to curators and slightly less going to authors (specifically the authors who receive early votes, whether self-votes or not). In practice the shift will not be much at all; the vast majority of the pool will still go to authors. In many cases an author who gets a little less by losing out from the early votes will then get a little more from the pool being bigger, for hardly any net change. It is very unlikely that most users (unless they routinely use the instant self-vote) will even notice a difference.
I'd like to see a more substantial change but I can't get worked up about this either way because it is almost nothing. I consider it in the category of small code tweaks.
This is absolutely not true. The value is greater the greater your stake. The increase in value of votes from anything that "returns to the pool" increases the value of your vote 40 times as much as it increases mine, because it inflates the value of every rshare equally and you distribute a lot more of them than I do.
Example: my 100% vote is 8c, yours is $3.38, and @smartsteem's is $177.26. The base "return to the pool" from HF20, absent any change in behavior, will be about 7%. (We'll actually get a lot of behavior changes and it will be less, but I'll use this number for convenience.)
A 7% increase in all of our power means my vote will now be eight and a half cents, yours will be $3.61, and Smartsteem's will be $189.67. Thus a much larger equity gap, and whales distributing a much larger portion of the pool relative to everyone else.
No, that won't happen. Think of it this way: If 1000 STEEM goes into the pool each day, 1000 STEEM comes out of the pool each day. Nothing about this change affects how much goes in, therefore it also doesn't change how much comes out. Assuming the same number of votes by the same amount of SP, each vote is allocating exactly the same portion as before (though it is allocating it a bit differently between authors and curators).
More will go to curation rewards and less to author rewards, but amount allocated by each voter will remain the same.
Even if what you wrote about the increase all of our power were correct, the portion (i.e. fraction) distributed by whales wouldn't be any different than before. Your own example demonstrates this. In the first case, @smartsteem is distributing 98.09% (177.26/(177.26+3.38+0.08)) and in the second case @smartsteem is distributing 98.09% (189.67/(189.67+3.61+0.085)).
The only way your claim about a shift of "gap" could be correct would be whales and non-whales systematically differ in how much extra they award to authors by the current (to be removed) early voting bonus to authors. That's possible but certainly not obvious, and your example didn't demonstrate it (or even claim it).
Your assumption is incorrect. What you want is "assuming the same number of rshares used to assign the pool" and HF20 will change that number by destroying some of them in the post payout process.
The fact that some of the rshares are destroyed after the vote doesn't really matter, they're still not being used to determine the rewards. So it's equivalent to a dramatic reduction in voting.
It's probably easier to think about this in some of the other ways "return to the pool" happens, like @steemit not voting. But it's the same effect.
Again, 1000 STEEM goes into the pool each day, which means 1000 STEEM goes out. If 1 million SP place votes, then STEEM is awarded out of the pool at a rate of 0.001 STEEM/SP. What happens in between doesn't matter.
There's no way around this.
(Obviously these numbers are made up and hypothetical. Substitute the actual numbers and the actual rate of STEEM/SP will still remain the same before and after.)
Wait, new users voting does affect the like amounts though, does it? If they do, then I'd say it does count as you know, Instagram exists where likes just represent people liking specific content and millions of people seem to be very happy using it.
You find it troubling that Steemit inc lets stake holders decide what "anything good" is like it should be rather than decide on their own where the money should go? I'd say that's more troubling.
Could you explain how voting mana is big deal? I haven't heard any talk about it.
Personally I'm most excited for account creation, it's about time services built upon Steem can actually let users create accounts from their interfaces fast and free.
This is the exact opposite of what HF20 is doing. When you vote and assign rshares to a post under HF20, some of those rshares (which currently go to the post author) will be destroyed based on what votes have come in during the fifteen-minute penalty period.
They are taking away some of your stake and using it to increase the rewards value of all rshares across the pool. The same vote will have different influence over the rewards depending on what post it's given to. If you vote on a post that has no votes in the penalty period your vote will continue to have as much influence as it does now, but every vote that goes to the post in the first fifteen minutes will reduce your later vote's effectiveness.
So the rshares that are being redirected are those that author would gain from all votes before 15 minute mark?
I thought the redirection would only happen to rewards that author would gain from selfvoting before 15 minute mark (curation rewards only) but by your description it applies even without selfvote from author?
And now that we're talking about how much control the system should have over the stake holders, I think it's clear that we need to have rules layed out on the blockchain level that encourage behavior that is beneficial to everyone and not just the highest holders of SP. For example now we can see that the trending tab has been taken over by post promotion, yet the Steemit Inc still speak about "proof-of-brain" with straight faces, which is a bit amusing to me, @ned you agree?
So it looks like the investors will take the shortest route to maximum possible financial reward - and that's why we're seeing promote bots, selfvoting (through multiple accounts) and circlejerking.
This kind of behavior should be altered by blockchain level rules as human is greedy and needs rules as otherwise we'll see others misbehaving and having to choose between acting good and losing money or following others and doing harm (in my opinion) to the whole ecosystem. Steem is a laughing stock when it comes to quality content currently.
So I'd say Steemit Inc really should take a step back and think about ways to guide users to act good rather than bad on this small, fragile ecosystem. Some simple rules like decreasing voting power on repeated votes towards same accounts would force people to actually widen the reach of their VP rather than setup systems that vote on their behalf also increasing curation rewards greatly would make actual curation and proof-of-brain more likely to happen instead of whales just parking their SP to promotion bots that everyone can and needs to use to reach trending feed with their questionable quality content.
These are my current thoughts on this issue. How popular would Reddit be if its trending page would be just full of advertisement like here on Steem, @andrarchy you got any guesses?
Yes, it applies to all votes before fifteen minutes, not just self-votes.
I agree, the system already sucks for new users they shouldn't be making it worse.
The votingmana change removing the SP delegation/vp exploit is great news.
@smooth, Yes, well awaited Hardfork finally got the official date and in my opinion this update didn't disappointed in any ways, and inturn bringing great vibes for sure.
And yes, RC system is effective and one of the important change and account creation aspect also simplified, and for sure this time this update will bring positives to the Steem Economy.
Now we are waiting for the SMT's and for sure SMT's will going to play the Revolutionary role for the Steem Economy. And in my opinion most importantly we need patience in these rough times because slowly everything will settle down.
SMT Economy will bring numerous opportunities in my opinion, and inturn every Steemian can get an chance to grow in Steem Economy.
Wishing you an great day and stay blessed. 🙂
I am with you 100%! Seeing a concrete date made my day/week/month/year! Although I think these changes are excellent, I think the big take away here is that this HF will put us even closer to the bigger things they are planning.
Thank you for posting this. Your opinion holds a ton of weight around here. I think you have done a great job of identifying many of the reasons that people should have a positive outlook for the future.
I really love the RC system. I hope it cuts down on wallet spam as before then there was really nothing that I’m aware of that could deal with that kind of thing.
It is also odd when a newer account can just go out and almost post 10k comments in their first month. While rare I’ve seen numbers like that almost happen. If this cut down nonsense like that as well I’d be happy about that.
This also might make it worthwhile for applications or other services that could show up in the future to buy in to accesses to RC on the blockchain at the rate they want to use it. While I hope it does not hurt indie development of things. I would hope it would not be too hard if a project become successful to come up with enough RC over the long time.
I will miss getting the free money from all those bots, you actually read that crap?
Probably among the list of what you perceive as "minor improvements" in point 5, but I would add "6. Reward beneficiaries paid based on author settings". It will be very helpful to improve access to liquidity for DApps and perhaps reduce the need to be continuously powering down. The sooner you can get your share of the rewards, the less risk you have in such a volatile market, which matters a lot if you're a small business here.
Yes I think it is pretty minor (of course, not nothing). Powering down and getting 1/13 per week isn't so bad. Likewise not disadvantaging beneficiaries should SBD be overvalued is also a nice tweak but hardly game changing.
I see it as more significant than that.
This is only true once you have a significant amount of SP to Power Down. For new DApps or projects having benefactor rewards as an important source of their revenue, it takes months to build up their SP so that the weekly power down equals their weekly revenue.
The need to wait so long is unfortunate for a number of reasons as compared to receiving more of their earnings early on:
One of my great hopes for Steem is that we can showcase through building successful businesses here that having Steem Power and utilizing the blockchain can give different applications a competitive advantage to similar services that do not use blockchain or Steem. This, I hope, would drive a more sustainable demand for SP and delegations. Making it easier for a new Steem-based StartUp to get going quickly with fewer burdens is, therefore, something I consider to be among the highest priorities.
These are my thoughts on the proposals.
https://steemit.com/witness/@ats-witness/steem-hardfork-20-thoughts-on-velocity
I’m with you on RCs and wanting to see what happens with them...but also not enthused about the account creation tokens, discounts, and witness parameters.
No Smart Media Token SMT, i think Steem lost a Train to be a EOS competitor
EOS is not even complete, its a bad gamble even at $5! Here are some EOS facts, way behind steemit chasing our coat tail!
https://steemit.com/eos/@dynamicrypto/buy-eos-and-fuck-off-steemit
What do you mean with complete? EOS has already the tokens, better wallets and a programmable language for smart contracts on top of the blockchain.. things that Steem maybe will have in march 2019!
Tokens, wallet & what language? They launched with a useless token & a dream on a tech that has not been completed still. Microsoft with Azure already does what eos wants to...
There seems to be an inordinate number of exclamation points.
Yes!