The Steem blockchain has done it again. We forked pretty successful and stable (but not in the way intended, if you see voting power and resource credits).

There was a warning for this fork: https://steempeak.com/steem/@steemitblog/hardfork-20-what-to-expect-tomorrow and it seems that it came true. There are issues and they continue till now.

First problem: negative RC mana

see steemitpost for this: https://steempeak.com/steem/@steemitblog/hf20-update-hardfork-successful

The new resource credit system is a great addition to the blockchain and I hope that it will give out resources more fairly. But the transition to the new system was not at all smooth. The idea was to initialize everyone with 90% of the maximum resource credits so that users could immediately transact. But the blockchain factored in actions before the fork which meant that many more active users found themselves with negative mana (sure it is easier for small SP holders to run out but everyone can be affected, many whales had negative mana).

There immediately came the patch v0.20.3 that most witnesses already updated to. But RPC nodes are not yet patched and will not pass transactions to the witnesses, meaning most frontends will still not work. We are hoping to have that change over the next few hours when more people update.

Second problem: voting mana reset

see steemitpost for this: https://steempeak.com/steem/@steemitblog/update-on-unexpected-voting-power-behavior

The new voting mana system is very interesting for app developers and fixes a few edge cases where tricky users could basically vote with more than they had. But this transition was also a bumpy one. Basically, all the voting power that people saved up was zeroed. If you had 80% before the fork, you started at 0. But it was reset from the last vote you made. So if you did not vote the last day, you started with 20% again.

There is no fix to this. Some users lost some voting power and some don't. I personally started at 0% and will have a few days of not curating as much to let my power build back up. Sucks but so is development, edge cases happen.

Improvements

see steemitpost for this: https://steempeak.com/steem/@steemitblog/steem-velocity-hardfork-hardfork-20

I am looking forward to the new changes in action. The RC system and the mana system will both allow frontends new ways to show users all their data and I hope they will make use of it. The discounted account system is already being tried out by account creators like @blocktrades and will soon be used to onboard even more users. The witnesses will monitor the rate of new accounts and start discussing the parameters of this system after they saw it live in action.

My actions

I reviewed some of the code of hf20 but with all the witness ranks I lost the last weeks I could not give it as much attention as I would have liked. I used the time waiting for replays to setup a development environment for steem and will soon work myself into the blockchain code. I plan to submit many patches to the code and also review new forks more thoroughly. But unless being a witness can pay me full time, I won't be able to full time work on things. There are many users asking for what witnesses to vote and who is at fault for the problems. And these questions are not easy to answer. But I can say that I monitor my witness votes all the time and vote for witnesses I feel are helping the network immensely. So maybe see my list and compare it with your list ;)

As always, any questions to anything on steem, hit me up in the comments!

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