A piece of forking cake

We are less than 20 hours away from Hardfork 20 which is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, September 25, at 11:00am EST. I think that is 18:00pm Finnish time. I am a bit excited.

My wife made blueberry pie tonight so, here is a picture of pie with a fork in it. I ate it with a spoon but Hard Spooning would be something completely different and probably something that is off-chain for most.

Hardfork 19 was amazing for me personally as the way it worked was it backdated the new rules to the old posts which meant that all posts were now calculated on the linear reward function and my posts grew in value by a factor of about 3. This gave me a fair bit of SBD which I converted into Steem and powered up.

The changes that HF19 brought affected the platform heavily as suddenly a much larger number of users had significant value in their vote and they started using it... On themselves and their comments. It also gave rise to the new whales, the bidbots.

Hardfork 20 however isn't going to be anywhere near as dramatic as 19 was. At least to begin with. There are tweaks to things like the cost of voting time from where previously the curation cost would degrade linearly from 0-30 minutes, now it will be 0-15 minutes. Also, at the moment the value of the vote cost is transferred to the poster but after HF20, it will go back into the pool.

When it comes to glamour, this hardfork isn't glamorous but it is a foundational step to accommodate the coming Hivemind communities upgrade and of course, SMTs which are scheduled for release in March 2019. HF20 is meant to increase the efficiency of the chain and even though most current users won't notice differences, it will hopefully allow a large number of new users to enjoy the blockchain also.

All of the technical changes like resource credits and discounted account creation based on Steem Power, I have no idea about but, in the witnesses we trust. As more and more laypeople come onto the platform, there is going to likely be an increasing gap between the technical components and the public because for the most part, the more that come in, the lower the average of technically minded or interested people there will be.

This is why these days are so important for users who are thinking to be on Steem long term because right now is the time we can learn without anywhere near the amount of noise that is going to be introduced as the platform fragments and decentralizes later. At this point, there is even some chance to affect the way the platform develops as it is still possible to engage in conversations with many of the devs.

Take benefit of learning about these kinds of things now is that in this world of growing blockchain adoption, there are very few people who know anything at all. There are going to be a whole range of new job sectors created at various levels of the ecosystem in the not too distant future.

Anyway, even though this is not likely to be a "wow!" kind of hardfork, it doesn't mean that it is easy to do and has taken a great deal of time to plan. It is almost a year and a half since the last hardfork which means the first 19 of them were all in the first year of the platform's existence. We know from events like last weeks outage that things don't always go to plan but, whatever happens tomorrow...

It was nice knowing you Steem.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]