A piece of forking cake

in steem •  6 years ago  (edited)

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 ]

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I think the most significant thing about this fork will be the ability of new users to sign up from the dapp they want to use and complete registration immediately. That should greatly accelerate growth.

Posted using Partiko iOS

I think the most significant thing about this fork will be the ability of new users to sign up from the dapp they want to use and complete registration immediately. That should greatly accelerate growth.

Yep, I am hoping this too and glad you mentioned it. The reason I left it out is the people who need to know, know how that works. But, it is important I think for people already here when they suggest people to sign up for something I guess :)

Lol. Nice knowing you. Steem not going anywhere hopefully. Didn't know that fact about the hard fork and must have been a big boost to everyone taking it seriously. I am looking forward to the changes and remain very positive towards the smt's coming next year.
I am hoping we don't have an outage tomorrow but we won't know until it happens.

I am predicting it will run pretty smoothly but never really know. I am no so harsh on the devs with these things though. :)

I think it will as last week would have been a wake up call to double check the what ifs.

Well I lived through hardfork 19 so I guess I will make it through 20. I appreciate the info on it. A question - How often do these hard forks come? Yearly or more often? The pie sounds good! LOL

There have been 19 of them so far in 2.5 years. Tomorrow 20. Often enough.

The pie was good btw :)

I think a successful transition will be great as it will demonstrate how we continue to evolve and adapt as a protocol that has transformed into something much more than a social experiment. The feature being created seem to improve (not completely fox) some of the issues many mention. However, the continued formation of groups like @steem-ua and other will continue to bring evolution to the Steem ecosystem as it expands. See you in the other side!

Each one brings fixes, me opportunities and new problems. The good thing is that in general, the direction is improving. See you soon :)

Hard Spooning would be something completely different and probably something that is off-chain for most.

Ha ha, that's funny!

Right now the crypto world is still fairly fringe, so people work there, but it's not yet in the way that people work in other tech sectors for large companies. Soon that will change. There will be people who have cut their teeth on projects on Steem that will go on to make lots of money in new projects. It's an exciting time to be involved.

Yep. There is going to be new industries and job shifts as the space matures (and the people). Lots of opportunities to arrive thankfully.

My concern is still with the Resource Credits (RC). They mention that comments take more resources than votes, all our transaction currently come out of our available bandwidth and votes take a certain set amount of time to regenerate. There is no set time for the ability to leave a comment. Will there be after HF20? Will we still be able to make as many post and comments as we want, or will only those over a certain amount of SP be able to post and comment at will?

I do not understand much of what is or already has happened, but i hope is for the best of everyone at steemit.