Your Easy to Understand Guide to Steemit’s Next Hard Fork scheduled for 2017-07-26T15:00:00 UTC (11:00:00 EDT)
So if you are anything like me: new to #steemit and new to cryptocurrencies, you have probably heard a ton about different “hard forks” that have been happening.
Up until now it has had to do with Ethereum, the DAO or some other cryptocurrency you don’t care about because you don’t have it.
Well that is about to change.
Steem 0.12.0 is scheduled for 2017-07-26T15:00:00 UTC (11:00:00 EDT)
And that means changes for YOU
Here is what is a “hand fork” anyways, what changes you should care about and what to do about it.
First for us new to this world of crypto introduced to us by Steemit
In the terms related to #Bitcon, another popular cryptocurrency you may have heard of, the definition of “hard fork” is: A permanent divergence in the the block chain, commonly occurs when non-upgraded nodes can’t validate blocks created by upgraded nodes that follow newer consensus rules.
Uh what?
Basically a “hard fork” is a change in the behind the scenes part of how things work, in this case it is mostly how Steemit root comment payouts work.
Michael Vandeberg had this info found on GitHub:
Issue #176
Each root level comment has a reward weight which impacts the end payout of the post. We are targeting 4 posts in 24 hours. Your first 4 posts in 24 hours will not be penalized. After that, they weight is decreased from 100% based on your average posting frequency. Having a frequency just barely higher than 1 every 6 hours will have very little impact, while spamming will be penalized heavily. This change is aimed to increase the quality of content at the cost of quantity.
For YOU, new Steemit user, it is simple. Only post about 4 articles a day. That means write good quality content.
Don’t SPAM.
Issue #177
Each discussion goes through a two stage payout. The first one is nearly identical to what currently happens on a new discussion except that we are weighting payout times by 12 hours instead of 24. This should cycle through currently trending content quicker. There is a second voting period set to 30 days after the first payout. This should help posts that don't have immediate viral success accumulate votes and have more consistent payouts in the long run. After the second payout a discussion becomes "frozen". The discussion is no longer editable and new replies are disabled. Users can still vote on comments in these discussions as a "nod" to the author without costing their posting power or awarding reward shares.
Payout times for articles is cut in half from 24 hours to 12!
Also good quality content that gets past up at first will have a chance at a longer shelf life with the voting pushed out to 30 days.
Do not despair if you are not rich within 12 hours of posting your masterpiece.
Issue #178
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding liquidity rewards. We are refraining from making a judgment at this point but want to spend more time reviewing their impact. We do believe that in their current form the liquidity rewards are simply too much for the value thy provide. As such, we are temporarily disabling liquidity rewards until we can design a better solution. In the meantime, a transaction fee free market should be incentive enough for users to continue to use the Steem internal market.
This only matters to new users how are here for market oriented trading of the currency. If you are like me and here for the social media side, then this doesn’t affect you.
However, I would recommend learning about it for your financial future to improve.
Issue #179
The average block size calculation is too high. We are reducing the minimum block size limit from 128k to 64k and changing the average block size threshold from max_block_size / 2 to max_block_size / 4. The net result is that the average block size threshold can be 4 times smaller. If witnesses chose to vote this way, it will make triggering transaction bandwidth limits easier, which is currently not applying except in the most extreme circumstances.
Personally I don’t understand this. I get from it that things will be improved which is good for us all.
Issue #184
Fixed a bug in the cli wallet that incorrectly allowed the wallet to attempt to broadcast an update account operation from a locked wallet. The broadcast would fail but created a poor user experience.
AND
Issue #186
Added recovery operations to account history so they can be tracked more easily.
@strangerarray side note in reference to your choose yourself link, don't forget to upvote your comments on here. You get paid for upvoting your own comment, just like a post.
Thanks for the tip!
Good tips.
Awesome, thank you for these explanations!
I am also confused with Issue#179, I trust that someone can shed some light on this!
It will reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent for a transaction. It should help the network run smoother.
Thanks!
no problem, it seems seems the hardfork is more of a patch with steem than the sky is falling situation with most others cryptos lol
Very informative, keep it up!
Well written, good job!
Thank you @positive!
Thanks @strangearray! I think the new payout schedule should help make rewards more fair, and I like the plan for spam prevention. Who can post more than 4 really good articles in a day (unless maybe they're putting up old work they've done)?
I agree on both issues. I especially like the 30 days thing because good articles are easily missed and also I link to my past articles so they too can get some love.
Yes, good stuff gets overlooked pretty easily.
You,r wright