HF19 "Equality" Coming Soon: Linear Rewards!
Hello Steemians!
We are happy to say that the witnesses have reached consensus on Hardfork 19, codenamed “Equality.” This update to the Steem Blockchain Protocol changes how rewards are distributed to the content creators using any Steem application like Steemit.com or Busy.org.
Linear Rewards!
The code was released last week and witnesses have been upgrading to it since that time. As of right now the top 20 witnesses are all running 0.19 but the changes described below will not go into effect until tomorrow morning (Tuesday, June 20th, 2017 at 15:00:00 UTC). Once those changes in logic take effect, the voting power of the users of any Steem-based application will be directly proportional to the amount of Steem Power they possess. Some have referred to this as “1 Steem Power, 1 Vote.” From that moment on accounts with a large amount of Steem Power will no longer have exponentially more voting power (i.e. influence) than accounts with less Steem power. This will reduce the degree of inequality within the ecosystem while preserving the incentive to accumulate STEEM and disincentivizing sybil-attacks.
What Are Hardforks?
For those new to Steem, “hardforks” are what people call updates to a blockchain protocol. The Steem Blockchain has an innovative Witness-based system that allows improvements to be made to the protocol more rapidly than other blockchain protocols. All that is necessary for a Steem hardfork is for the top 20 witnesses, who are chosen by the users, to adopt the changes based on their assessment that the code is bug-free and does not pose a threat to the security of the blockchain.
When it comes to most blockchains, a change like the one that will occur would either never happen, or would lead to an entirely new blockchain that would coexist alongside the unchanged original. Thanks to Steem’s unique design, when it became clear that there was a widespread consensus among Steem users that the reward system needed to be changed, we were able to come together and implement this change which will make the Steem Ecosystem more fair, and the Steem Blockchain more valuable.
Improving the Process
It was only 2 months ago that we first started experimenting with a proposal process which involved presenting the changes we were considering to the community for feedback before attempting to update the blockchain. We had lots of great discussions with the community which helped guide improvements to our proposal and that enabled us to arrive at a consensus regarding the necessary changes.
Thank you!
We want to give a special “Thank You” to everyone who contributed to this discussion and helped make the Steem Blockchain even better. That includes all the Witnesses, not just the top 20, who work tirelessly to maintain the stability, security, and sanctity of the Steem Blockchain. Their communication, cooperation, and diligence have enabled us to execute this change in the timeframe we did while meeting our high quality assurance standards.
Additional Information
The information below was included in our previous post Pre-Release HF19: Linear Rewards! and is included below for the benefit of those who would like to familiarize themselves with the other changes that will be occurring.
Curation Rewards and Vote Impact
There are two other changes, aside from linear rewards, within the update that affect non-technical community members: 1. Changing to a square root curation rewards curve and 2. Increasing vote impact.
Curation Rewards
The change to the curation rewards curve will not have a noticeable impact on curation rewards and is necessary simply to prevent the linear reward curve changes from having a material impact on curation rewards.
Vote Impact
The changes to the impact of a 100% vote are more material. A 100% vote will be 4 times more powerful once HF19 is completed. As it stands now a single 100% vote uses only 0.5% of your remaining voting power (voting power regenerates fully over a 5 day period). That means real users would need to vote 40 times a day at full power to use most of their voting power. This leaves users who are less active unable to fully leverage their voting power. After this change, a single 100% vote will use 2% of your remaining voting power, meaning that 10 full-power votes a day will now be enough to leverage the majority of your daily voting power.
Users can continue to simply upvote-at-will because a vote only consumes a percentage of the remaining voting power, not the total. Imagine “voting power” as a swimming pool that is constantly being refilled by the rain. Every time you upvote you reduce the amount of water (in this case “voting power”) from the pool by a percentage (i.e. it’s not like you are constantly removing 500 gallons from the lake). The next time you vote you are removing another percentage from an already diminished supply.
That means there are still no limits on how much you can vote. The more you vote the more you incrementally decrease the amount of voting power you have (the water in the pool). To get a better sense of how powerful your votes are and the rate at which that power diminishes simply observe how much your full power upvotes increase the rewards of content creators and you should get an intuitive sense of how the algorithm works.
You can read the release notes on github here: https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases/tag/v0.19.0rc1
We have more exciting announcements coming this week, so stay tuned and Steem On!
- Team Steemit
Looking for a definitive clarification on what happens to posts created between 13th June 1500 UTC and 20th June 1500 UTC, that'll start paying out right after HF19. Will the pending payouts hold as voted before HF19? So, if I made a post today and one whale voted it up to $20, will the payout still be $20 on the 26th? Or will it be retroactively "linearized"? I'm inclined to believe the linear rewards will only start from votes given out after HF19, and thus the existing payouts will be honoured, but a clarification would be appreciated. Suggest you add that to the post.
This is definitely a good step forward from the absence of communication surrounding HF18. Eagerly awaiting those exciting announcements!
Haha, I have experienced in HF 17. My post for $ 18 (that's a big amount for me) to 0 when HF 17.
Yeah, that was a mess. While it was announced on Github, it was never communicated properly to the community. That's why a lot of people were upset - had they known it was to be expected, they would be prepared for it.
Similarly, it's important to know what kind of changes we should expect to pending payouts this time.
I think the best demonstration of the rewards change would be to have 20 or so whales vote on my comment with their full power and then wait to see if the payout remains the same or decreases after the fork.
I just gave you a puny minnow upvote, because that was very funny!
A brilliant idea!
Cg
Nice try :)
Yes, do the experiment. Whales vote on my last post so I can record the results.
In a recent post by @timcliff, I believe he said that if a post hasn't paid out by the time the hard fork is implemented, it will be retroactively linearized.
Which seems to be in direct contradiction with this post.
Need a clarification from the developers.
Will vote impact also be implemented retroactively? Will everyone's individual voting power initially take a massive hit? If all my 100% votes from the last week turn into 400% votes I'm going to be totally drained lol.
Haha, good question. I haven't heard that to be the case.
😲😂 it better not be
9 hours later, nobody knows. That's how we roll @steemit
Thanks for the article, great way of explaining it all.
I love this new system, check it out, can pay myself $10.
And again.
Congratulations for that! I hope I can achieve this level too someday!
I am a relatively new user. I registered approximately 1 month ago.
Have a nice day!
This looks like it's going to be yuge. But people will be more careful on voting. It might actually do the opposite of "equality", people will vote up hot and trending authors because of possible higher curation rewards while new section will be a scroll practice.
Upvoting an already trending post is the worst strategy when it comes to curation rewards. You'll only add curation rewards to the early voters while making a negligible amount yourself. The rewards algorithm heavily favours early voters.
Instead upvote great undiscovered posts, then spread the word around. That's the optimal way to maximise curation rewards. Or maybe strike a balance by voting early on a semi-established but not trending author, they will get some votes after you.
Of course, you're right to be concerned that few are aware of how the rewards system works and may end up piling the votes on trending posts in ignorance. Worse still, they might end up being the kind of casual voters who make less than 10 votes per day, and now suddenly have much greater influence due to the vote impact change.
I hope as a community we can curate responsibly. It'll need the right education and support.
Very useful info, thanks!
I see that as a possibility that most people will just want to power up trending posts 🤔😩😂
Interesting, thanks for the info! Still trying to figure things out on Steemit and posts / replies such as this one really help to understand! Cheers
Thanks for advice, very helpful
Agreed, not sure why the curation rewards had to be amplified. I haven't seen curation incentivise voting that is beneficial to the platform as a whole. (Apart from upvoting #introduceyourself posts)
Your comments make sense !!!
=]
a lot has changed since the beginning, maybe an update with the whitepaper is needed to help new users(even old ones).
Yes, this makes sense to me..
I would like to see very much transparency and ease of use on knowing where this is all going?
thankyou..
Great job by the team, and the witnesses! Appreciate your efforts.
What possibilities this will bring forth, we will get to see. But for the great number of new users that have joined recently, this will be their first hard-fork experience and hoping it will benefit all and move forward the cause of making steemit beautiful and taking it to the masses.
Thanks for including these points. Voting power is widely misunderstood, and it's important for users to know that they can still vote as much as they want.
Can someone explain how a linear reward curve disincentivizes sybil attacks? I thought the purpose of the ^2 reward curve was to disincentize sybil, and that sybil attacks were precicely the perceived problem with a linear or near-linear curve.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly favor this change, but I'm not sure I understand how it would disincentivize sybil attacks.
Good question @shenanigator. There were multiple reasons for the n^2 curve only one of which was discouraging sybil attacks. The statement to which you are referring is only meant to highlight the point that despite these changes it will remain advantageous to accumulate Steem and disadvantageous to launch sybil attacks.
Currently, it's too easy for whales to dominate and abuse the system. The central fallacy of the original whitepaper / n^2 was that whales would act in the best interests of the community, but evidently people will only ever act in their own self interest. As they have the right to, of course. By distributing influence more evenly, the impact of whale abuse is significantly diminished.
For the most part, I would say that it "does not incentivize" sybil attacks. I think "disincentivizes" overstates it.
Although, one way that it actually may slightly disincentivize sybil attacks is that other users can vote between two sybil accounts, say sybil-1 and sybil-2, which would reduce the curation rewards of (sybil-1 + sybil-2) as compared to a single account voting the full weight all at once.
Yup, I don't understand how it makes it fairer; I'm just taking their word for it; however it would be nice having it explained.
Cg
Thank u, Have a nice day
Should we expect any drastic shift in current pending payouts due to the changes in voting influence of votes that were already made ?
as I heard from one of the developers, the high reward posts like 4k figures will get kicked in the butt, while the post in the range of 1-200 USD will get a boost.
Good question. I was wondering the same thing.
I hope HF 19 gives a fair reward system. I have never achieved a reward of 100, maybe my posts are not qualified. But, what about other posts that are not qualified can get a lot of rewards?
good morning, don't be confused by 100 ... 100% upvote is not the same as an upvote that gives $100 (i have no idea how to do the math ... but i'm thinking you might need a whale to come by and upvote to get $100) ... anyway you can see who has been able to vote for you at what % at https://www.steemnow.com/ Right this second, 100% of my vote would be about 0.005 ... hope that helps :)
Cool app. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for sharing this valuable information.