Let's Fork // HF21- What To Expect
I know many are writing about the upcoming fork and honestly I feel like we are so much better prepared than we were the last time around. There has been lots of communication, discussion, and even that awesome blue banner pinned at the top of Steemit.com to advise everyone that a Hardfork will be happening Tomorrow, August 27th at 11am EDT.
I wanted to take the time to do a #NormieTalk style post for what it will actually look like though, for us everyday users.
If you have no idea what a fork is or what I am talking about, I suggest you read this post first-
It goes into each aspect of the fork, the goal of these changes, and a bit more detail about them.
But what will us normal users have to actually do tomorrow?
Nothing.
There is nothing for an everyday user to have to actually "do" for this fork. The majority of the top 20 witnesses (block producers) are already running the 21.0 code, and at the scheduled time the chain will just officially change tracks to that code. Back up witnesses will begin implementing the new code, if they haven't already, and the new changes will immediately take affect.
So what can we expect?
As an everyday user things will look a bit different here (as far as economics go) and it is important to note that there will be a "balancing" time. When new economics are put in place it takes time for the ecosystem to react to show the true change.
I believe the first few weeks will be a bit crazy and it's important to be patient and wait for the system to balance before going into full rage mode.. I mean.. I am sure some !drama will be rewarded, but I am just saying that what you see on day one (or 7) of the new changes are not necessarily a good example of what the "norm" will be.
We need to be patient, realize we are trying something new, and give it time to work.
But what will it look like?
Post Rewards
This fork includes economic changes that are changing the rewards split to 50/50, implementing a curve, as well as using reallocating 10% of the inflation pool to the Steem DAO (SPS). These changes are explained in detail in this post, as well as the desired affect of these changes. Therefore I will not go into details about what they are exactly here, rather just explain what it will look like (in my opinion.)
It is important to remember that on the chain things are calculated in a 7 day payout window. This means that post payouts going back to Aug 20th will see the change.
Yes, that means the amounts you see currently will be different after the fork. This will be true for ALL posts still in the payout window. This does not mean that someone took your money or anything else.. it simply means the change took effect and therefore all posts within the payout window will reflect said change.
We need to remember that the payout we see on our posts are ever changing, and it's not ours until the system has found consensus (end of payout window), and those funds are deposited into our Steem Wallets. If it's not in your wallet, it's not yours.
Based on the numbers I have seen - this will be a decrease of about 40% of what we currently see. This isn't the norm necessarily, remember the system needs time to balance and we have a lot of factors at play here - but I believe this is what we can expect in the beginning.
So we all should just be prepared to see these "payout" changes on all posts tomorrow... no freak outs people.
Downvotes
This fork includes an implementation of 2.5 "free" downvotes to every user. Again, the post above goes into more detail about this, but currently we are allocated 10 "free" (100%) upvotes that are regenerated every 24hrs. When we use one of those to downvote something, we are giving up the possible curation rewards that would have been earned if we used it to upvote instead. This new change just means we now have 2.5 (100%) downvotes that can be used without giving up those curation rewards. You can choose to use them how you like, but each user is only allocated the 2.5, meaning you could do your full vote weight on a few posts, or split them up using a lower vote weight among many posts.
Downvotes are an essential part of the ecosystem and the best description I can give for their use is that they are the opposite of an upvote. Both utilize a users stake (SP) to show where they want the rewards pool (inflation) allocated. Upvotes show they feel the content is under rewarded, downvotes show they think it’s over rewarded (plagiarism, don’t like it, low quality, abuse or just valued too high in that stake holders opinion). This process helps find community consensus and at the end of the payout period, whatever consensus is found is then allocated to the author.
The rewards pool is not free money, it’s inflation based on those who have invested in Steem Power. The act of upvoting and downvoting helps to establish a consensus of the crowd, deciding where those funds should be allocated.
Yes, some people don’t use them correctly, but they are an important part of the system itself. And after this fork we should be prepared to see more downvotes being used in general.
These may be used to fight bid bot abuse, to balance the rewards of some authors who are maybe taking a bit more of the shared inflation pie, to break up vote trading that many may see as unhealthy for the ecosystem etc. The truth is that if this is going to work as designed, downvotes should just become a normal part of the culture here and used to balance those rewards - ensuring that precious inflation is being allocated to that which adds "value" in one way or another.
Will there be abuse of downvotes? - Yep, there is now so it only makes sense we will continue to see it.
Will there be a rush of these abusive downvotes that ruins Steem and destroys everything?? - Ummm I don't think 2.5 downvotes are really going to make that sort of a change and logically those people would already be doing this damage.. so I don't see much of a change happening here. I think we can relax on that front. :)
I do hope we see more stakeholders actively using their downvotes to fight the current abuse and honestly, this all depends on them doing so.
So yes you may see some "flag wars".. but just remember those funds are just being returned to the pool and then allocated to everyone else. Two whales flagging each other is actually not too shabby for the rest of us, just relax and carry on.
Downvotes will be a cultural change for us, and I do believe it will take time to get used to. I believe we have to just come to terms with the fact that it's not always personal (and shouldn't be) and it is just part of the community trying to find consensus - otherwise known as "Proof of brain."
So if you get a downvote, don't panic.. just do your thing and carry on. If you are receiving large downvotes for unjust reasons, feel free to reach out and I will do my best to help you walk through what should be done next. Generally even if someone throws a "personal" downvote your way, ignoring and carrying on is the best option.
I do think there should be an active effort to counter unjust downvotes as well, and believe with organization we can change our culture around downvotes for the better.. that's my hope anyways, but it may be a bumpy ride at first and we all should be prepared for that.
Steem Proposal System (SPS)
The Steem Proposal System (or Steem DAO) is an automated system that will be coded into the chain. You can read more about it on the link at the beginning of this post or by checking out @blocktrades blog. They have written many posts going into full detail about the project, as they are the company who proposed and coded it as well.
There are many safe guards in effect as well as "daily budgets" etc that help to ensure the funds will not be abused. Please check out their posts for more information on that.
For the normal user we won't "see" much here as far as a change. There are multiple front ends being worked on to be the way we "view" this system.
Here are the current ones:
Individuals submitting a proposal will be making a post to outline their proposal with details on work, requested payments etc. Then they will be submitting this to the SPS itself. We then can view these and cast our vote on which we feel should receive funding.
To ensure that there is no bad characters trying to take advantage of the system on day one (or thereafter) @gtg will be submitting a "return proposal", which will act as a placeholder until other suitable proposals are voted above it. This return proposal simply returns the daily budget back to the SPS fund itself.
You can read more about this here:
This one I think we all need to just be prepared to keep watch over what proposals are being made and vote accordingly. We can rally to help certain ones get attention if needed or rally against those who seem to be trying to abuse it. This is essentially giving the community a way to help fund development as well as other advancements that could benefit STEEM as a whole. We should actively be involved in this!
First step will be to vote the "return proposal" tomorrow when it goes active to ensure we have that safe guard placeholder at the top. Then we can see what other proposals trickle in.
Other Changes
There are also some small changes that were more "convenience" add ins to this fork as well. I figured it may be helpful to go over a few of them here too. (They can all be found on the Steem github if you are curious).
Reduce Curation Reverse Auction Window
The current "curation window" is set at 15 minutes, and will be reduced to 5 minutes in tomorrows fork. This means that we can all vote earlier on posts we like and not have to wait for that 15 minute time.
For more information on how to optimize curation windows for Curation Reward purposes or to get more information on how this window works exactly, please see this post:
If you are someone who votes based on the "best" time, the you will need to adjust your current technique and the above post will help with that.
If you are someone who just votes what you like, when you like... no change is needed, just do your thing!
New Account Update Operation
This one may not mean much to many, but if you had a hard time changing your "settings" to your profile after the wallet split a few months ago.. you will see why this one is beneficial.
Currently to make a change to these settings (Profile photo, etc) it requires your active key. Everything that requires the active key was moved to the separate wallet, which means you have to go to your wallet to change these settings.
This change is lowering the authorization needed to make these changes to your posting key. The Steemit inc. team will be making the UI changes needed to move these settings to your profile sometime after the fork, but this is the change needed to be able to do that.
This should make the user experience a bit better, which I am always excited about.
Zero Mana Voting
This one is pretty straight forward - in the current system if your mana is at "0" you cannot cast a vote, this change will just allow that to happen. These votes will not earn curation rewards and will not impact the rewards of what they are voting, but they will be allowed to still take place with this change.
Comment Edit Lockout
Again another simple one but may be worth noting as some users experience could be different - The current system has no limit on how many times a comment can be edited within a block. This does have an impact of over all performance so a change is being made to allow one edit to a comment each 3 second block.
So if you are someone who makes a comment and then quickly edits within a three second time period, you may get an "error" message. Wait a moment and try again. Pretty straight forward.
13 Week Powerdown
In the current system when calculating the Steem Power down rates it is rounded down which results in a small "dust" amount that is actually withdrawn on the 14th week. This simple fix just takes that dust amount and redistributes it across the 13 week period. This will just eliminate that dust amount the 14th week is all.
Final Thoughts
This Hardfork has some pretty big changes for us - changes that will hopefully improve our ecosystem for everyone here. It is important to remember that we don't know what the results will be, and another change may be needed if the results begin to look detrimental. These changes may not be a fix all, but they are an attempt to improve the ecosystem, and I hope we all give it a chance to at least attempt to do so.
Let's be patient and keep the big picture in mind - the success of STEEM. Let's give the system the time it needs to balance as well as work together to improve our culture here, as we are all in this together.
I'll see you on the other side!
Much Love and Steem On,
Justine
This noob says thank you
Your normie posts always help me
I am just being patient
See what’s on the other side
Though about posts that earn more and less than 20 Steem and what comes after the fork .... that’s going to be a hard pill to swallow since I am in the latter bracket .... as most of us are.
Just keep swimming for now and hoping for the best ...:)
You’re welcome and thank you, really happy to hear they are helping you. The cut off for the curve does seem to be confusing some, but at 1 STEEM (18 cents) the decrease in rewards is expected to be less than 40%, and that percentage decreases as the STEEM amount increases. (Example 5 STEEM/90 cents) would be less than a 20% decrease etc. These are just estimates of course but I think there was a confusion that anything under the linear (20 STEEM) was somehow going to equate to no payout, and that’s just not the case.
We will see more as we go along, but I believe the cuts will be less than people expect... and of course they will be earning more in the curation side.
I do hope it is not as bad as some say
Time will tell :)
Thank you Justin
Very clear :)
I like that you term a downvote as a loss in curation rewards - for some the biggest loss is their author rewards, 5/6/7 times a day.
I'd forgotten about https://steemproposals.com/proposals, thanks for the link.
Choices between beach and watching the downvotes roll in, hmmm...
Well the fact that downvotes in their current state are a loss of curation rewards is the reason for the 2.5 free downvotes. Yes some will (and do) see a loss in author rewards due to them, and will continue. I think I covered those as well though, I just think they are different things. One being the reason the "free" downvotes are needed and the other being a flaw in our current culture surrounding downvotes. I hope as they become more normalized the abuse will stop too.. and I mean it when I say that includes the countering of unjust downvotes.
Can't you watch the downvotes while on the beach? ...
I'll be watching the ships roll in :)
Perfect :)
Good summary of the doom that awaits us, j/k :)
As usual with @justineh, everything all pretty darn close to the happy path. And no mention of the biggest buzzkill of all: The way the unchanged dust level treshold interacts with the totality of HF21 inflation split and reward curve changes.
On the upside. I think (hope) part of the doom is already behind us. The markets rejected this HF as expected, but not as hard as it could have. It's a pity the steepish market value drop after the announcement EIP was to be part of HF11 didn't act as a wake-up call, but HD21 could have easily been rejected to below the 0.00001 BTC mark. The fact that it wasn't, and that unless we have an other user lockout, probably won't, gives that silver lining to this most fragile of times in the history of STEEM.
My doom and gloom post will come when needed, until then I’ll leave that to you 🙂
As I stated, this is a simple overview to just try to help users have some sort of expectations of what the changes with look like. As I see more, I will share more.
Feel free to make your own posts if you feel mine aren’t sufficient. That’s the beauty of decentralization 😉
You do normie talk a 1000x better than me. That's probably when nobody ever listens to me when talking about dust level. Your overview would have been more complete with a discussion, even a happy path discussion of comment up-voting IMHO.
I definitely could have included more, things I just didn’t even consider. I don’t purposely leave things out, just sometimes things slip my mind.
As an example, right after I published this post I ran across a comment of an author who thought all rewards under the curve threshold would go to 0. I had no idea this was a confusion of some and tried to rectify it in the comment, but yes that could of been helpful in the post.
I may edit it tomorrow to include these things or write another one in the coming days.
One thing though is that I try to keep these normietalks simply informative and not opinion heavy. Clearly my opinions slip in sometimes but I do try to keep the posts pretty general so they can just be used as a source of information and not my own “agenda”. I think that’s important.
Dust vote is a concern of mine, but it’s one of those that falls into the -lets wait and see what this looks like area.
I can promise that I will continue to do my best to help these concerns be heard and push for solutions as we move forward with these changes. They will not be ignored.
doesn't @dustsweeper take care of this?
https://steemit.com/dustsweeper/@dustsweeper/dustsweeper-faq
There are a couple services that do, yes. It’s just that the current SP needed to reach the “dust threshold” will be doubling after the fork. It would be good for more to learn about dustsweeper and dustbunny etc to help counter this. I’ll try to spread the word a bit.
dustbunny? lol. might sack the sweeper and get the bunny :)
Just did an attempt. Doom and gloom with a silver lining ;-)
Tried to make it complementary to the stuff you discussed already and most of all, focus on the incentives, not so much the happy path or the worst case scenario.
You'll probably still think it's a doom and gloom post ;-)
But what will us normal users have to actually do tomorrow?
Oh, as for waiting this one out. The unchanged dust treshold is going to take time to sink in. Most of the real drama is likely to happen after people adjust to the new reality. Social interaction for minnows and red fish and holding stake for minnows and dolphins is going to lose most of its economic value. Both these facts, when they sink in could d(and likely will) drive funds and social interaction to other places. I hope it will be Scot tribes, but it could as well be the bid bot economy. This HF is as likely to hurt true curration and hurt it badly by driving small stake holders to delegate to and use bid bots, as it is to aid it by driving small stake to a scot tribe. It will take time to see what happens. But if there is going to be real drama om that side of things, it won't be for a few weeks.
I actually pushed for a change in the dust threshold and believe it can be implemented if needed on the future code change. We don’t exactly know what this will look like.. so while I could make a post that rages on about how much I don’t like some of this or be very dramatic with doom and gloom, I don’t see how that would be beneficial.. as I don’t know what this will look like. I’d prefer to wait and see before I get the pitchforks and start screaming (I’ve don’t plenty of that in private 😉).
As far as your guide of what you think users should do, I disagree but to each their own. Many steps have been taken to ensure this fork goes more smoothly than the last, again we will have to wait and see on that. I’ve been removing witness votes for months though and I suggest everyone make those decisions wisely.
But to go into full panic mode and dump everything seems quite silly.. I mean even the “apocalypse” of HF20 meant some people went 2 days at most without being able to transact.. you make it seem like you lost your life savings and were locked out of your account.
I understand the concern and I actually agree with some of it.. I’m just handling it in a more logical way imo.
I’ll be here to help anyway I can during and after, it’s the best I can do.
Im very much excited for the new changes coming. Lets enjoy the new steem
Yep, my mantra for the past week has been 'keep calm and steem on.' I'm not envisioning an apocalypse, just a period of transition. I'll admit that I think I'll see lower payouts, but I'd do what I do here anyway, so anything at all is like a nice tip.
That’s a good mindset to have! I did go into it a bit more on the post I linked in the beginning, but if all the components work together as intended, you may actually see an increase. But yes, there will be a transition time for sure. We will get through it 🙂
Very nice article! Easy to read and understand! Some bits are still too technical for me!
Thanks for sharing!
Reblogged.
Thank you! Feel free to ask any questions you have. The first post I linked does break each part down a bit if that helps too (not sure if you looked at that one or not), but please let me know.. as I think knowledge is power 😉
Thanks so much for your kind reply. I’ll get to that paper when I have the time.
Your generosity and positive way are very catching!
Great post! Thank you for setting user expectations!
Thank you!! Always easier to accept change when we know what is coming. Hope it at least a few. 🙂