Steemit Reveals New Details on Hardfork 20 Update

A new blog post published on Steemit has revealed details pertaining to the upcoming Steem platform Velocity Hardfork (Hardfork 20). Scheduled for September 25, the Velocity Hardfork will be implemented a little over a month from now pending on a vote of approval by a super-majority of the platform’s witnesses.The new 30-section report published by the Steemit Blockchain Team highlights important changes being made to Steem’s Bandwith system, user account features, curation system, witness protocols, and much more.

New Resource Credit System

The report begins by confirming a proposed change to Steemit’s current Bandwith system in favor of a ‘new-and-improved’ Resource-Credits (RCs) protocol.“Steem is one of the only freemium blockchains in the world,” reads the announcement. “The new RC system will make it the most advanced freemium blockchain in the world without compromising the existing features and functionality that make Steem such a powerful platform for building DApps.”Details on how the RC system will work are described in an earlier blog post found here.

Account Updates

A number of account creation updates are proposed to go into effect through the Velocity Hardfork including a new discounted account creation system, complete with a global pool of discount account creation tokens and a stake-based discount account creation market. There are also propositions for new burn account creation fees and proposed changes to be made to Steem’s ‘Dust Vote Threshold’.Updates to the Dust Vote Threshold will allow users with any amount of Steem Power (SP) tokens to cast votes in the platform’s Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm assuming they have sufficient RCs. However, votes that fall below the threshold will not have any impact on rewards.“This change will make very weak votes become worth nothing,” the report explains. “In order to treat all votes (big and small) equally, all votes above the threshold will have the equivalent amount of rewards removed from their vote. This effectively establishes a baseline voting strength that applies to everyone.”

Curation Updates

The Velocity Hardfork comes with a number of curation updates including a proposed lowering of the current 30-minute curation window down to 15 minutes to help the platform fight against bots. Additionally, the Velocity Hardfork will remove unfair self-voting rewards currently being paid to authors who are presently cutting into curation rewards by immediately voting for their own content following its creation. These proposed changes are designed to “better serve the original mission of the curation rewards budget: to ensure that the Steem blockchain distributes rewards to the most valuable content.”

Changes for Witnesses

Along with requiring witness price feeds to be based on SBDand quoted in STEEM, the Velocity Hardfork will be implementing new flexible witness parameters designed to support account creation fees, maximum block size, sbd interest, signing keys, and witness URLs. While the current witness update operation will remain functional, the new witness parameters being added to the platform will serve to provide added security benefits to witnesses.

“Witnesses will have two new witness parameters to submit. The account_subsidy_daily_rate will control the amount of discounted account creation tokens that are added to the global pool daily. The account_subsidy_pool_cap will control the maximum number of discounted account creation tokens allowed in the pool. These values will be submitted via the new witness_set_properties.“

Other Updates

• Removal of 20-second comment limit: New comments will be allowed for every block (once every three seconds)
• Fix to reported double-voting exploits
• Decrease in the delegation cooldown period from seven days to five
• Upvotes and downvotes made during the last 12 hours of the payout period will decrease linearly in strength from 100 to 0 percent over time to stabilize payouts
• New 50/50 payout options which will allow authors to receive 50 percent of rewards in SP and 50 percent in “liquid payout”
• Updates to canonical signature system using BIP-0062
• Discontinued support for the creation of accounts via mining with changes to enable account mining on Steem via a softfork at a future date

Timeline

The report states that the majority of the development for the Velocity Hardfork has already been completed. The official hardfork is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, September 25th, at 11:00am EST. The Steemit Blockchain Team will be tagging the Hardfork release no later than August 25th to give witness and node operators at least 30 days to review and test the proposed changes.