We're Closer To Hardfork 19 - Why Is That Important?
12 out of 70 active witnesses are now running Steemd version 0.19.0 (which is the release candidate for Hardfork 19). 2 of them are in the top 19 witnesses, 6 of them in the top 50 witnesses (also known as runner-up witnesses) and 2 of them in the back-up witnesses platoon.
That means the adoption of hardfork 19 is very close. Based on my past (and present) experience as a witness and taking into account the recent developments I expect it to happen in 2 weeks, maximum. It may happen even faster than that.
Why is that important?
3 things.
1. The Reward Algorithm Is Going To Be Linear
Each vote will draw from the reward pool exactly what it represents, in terms of Steem Power. As of now, the reward algorithm is squared (n^2) which means the reward drawn from the reward pool grows exponentially with the amount of Steem Power of the voter, making whales extremely influential.
2. Voting Power Will Be "Depleted" After 10 Full Power Votes
As of now, if you vote with "full power", your voting stamina will deplete after around 40 votes. Starting hardfork 19, it will take only 10 votes to reach that level. Of course, you can vote with less power, and that will conserve your reserve for longer.
3. Whales Will Start Voting Again
As some of you (still) remember, there is an experiment in which whales are not voting. Or, if they are voting, they're being countervoted with equal power by other whales, by a process known as flagging. That experiment had very mixed result in the community (among those results, it ended up with one and a half month of Steemit hiatus for me) and I'm happy it will end.
What To Expect?
More revenue for good content creators, (probably) better content on the trending page and (wishfully) less drama.
As I already said, I expect that these moves will also create a stronger "middle class" in the Steemit ecosystem, a more powerful cohort of dolphins.
For the Steemit ecosystem I created a free tool for checking your potential rewards at steem.supply.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Thanks for this Information!
Thank you for this post on hardfork 19 it's making sense to me more and more. Is this something that will be implemented for the whole community overnight as a whole or will this be released in phase?
Once all witnesses will run the latest version, the transactions will start to be signed with the new params. It may take a while until the reward pool evens.
Thank you, makes sense.
I had no idea this experiment was happening at all... But I will be glad when it does end.
it was kinda quiet but there was a post about it a while ago.
Really? Would like to read it myself - do you know the link?
https://steemit.com/experiment/@timcliff/the-whale-no-vote-experiment-whale-participation-data
Thanks!
I'm very excited to see the effects of HF19. Curious to see how it will work out on post rewards, once voting power is linear.
That's what i'm curious about as well... Also whether we'll be seeing less votes from now on.
Yeah, that's a good point. I think people with higher voting power are already used to using their percentage slider. This might just become a lot more important after the HF.
me too :)
Fostering the lower and middle class, that is why I gave you my witness-vote : )
Hello sir dragosroua. Thanks for delivering this to us in a much more simple way and that is friendly to the mass.
I actually thought at first that the Linear Rewards in HF 19 will be in favor to the whales, which I was wrong. Thanks for clearing this out.
It's best to give more power to the middle class who have worked hard and had gone through a lot of ups and downs like you. Because I think you guys understand it more and are more interactive to the community.
Thank you. Hopefully us in the middle have a chance to earn on original content. The rich just seem to get richer usually. Hopefully this 4x vote power increase doesn't mean that the whales just upvote them selves 100% and dont vote anyone else. Thanks for the update on hardfork 19. Awaiting the change to see its impact. Much appreicated
Thanks for the summary @dragosroua . This is very helpful.
I am looking forward to Whale votes :)
Unfortunately they usually vote for each other.
Not all of them do - some are pretty generous.
Some do for sure. Like @thejohalfiles will for sure. There are a lot. I dont mean to be rude and say that they are not voting on smaller post but generally they vote on others who are more likely to get a lot of votes, that way they make some from curation.
I hope it is successful. I keep hearing about this new hardfork, so at this point, I want it to get here so we can start talking about number 20, ha.
linear rewards are a much needed change! looking forward to the fork!