RE: The Hardfork is upon us. A (hopefully) layman's review of the HF20 post from steemitblog
Well it just seems like every time a new update comes out EVERYBODY posts basically a copy of the update to try to earn some rewards. I think this is just barely a shade under plagiarism honestly. But I tried to put my own spin on it so that it felt more unique. Cheetah didn't come by, so maybe I'm okay. haha
As to the forking, what you describe is also a hard fork. So it gets complicated. The hard fork you are talking about is more when groups of individuals disagree about the hard fork and instead of the entire blockchain taking the hard fork, you have one group who take the hard fork and one group who stay on the old version, thus creating two different chains.
For Steem this is really a big key to your Witness voting. A Fork cannot be implemented until the Top 20 witnesses upgrade to the new version. Period, end of story. 19 witnesses updated? Sorry, we're still on version 19. So if any of the Top 20 witnesses were to go dormant, we would be stuck until we managed to rally the vote to knock them out of a top 20 position for someone who will take the new version.
In theory Steem could Hard Fork into two versions I suppose.... but I don't know the technical side of that.
Wellllllllll, us noobs don't follow those everybodys... I can't speak for all newbies but we only care about words that are simple and gifs that are amazing.
I actually did some research after writing this comment and yes, came to the conclusion that I wasn't wrong... but I wasn't aware that forking was also regarded as a new version. Thanks for that.. it had been skewing my reading of cryptocurrency updates.
In the event that Top 20 witnesses do go dormant, what happens then? Surely enough whales would request the community to update their witness votes and/or vote someone new in. I've only used 5 votes so far, so I'm sure there are heaps of people that could make significant change with some guidance.
I expect at some point there will be at least another version of Steem... if it becomes massive and a hugely influential social media platform, I'm sure the Googles, CNNs, Disneys would want their own platform where they can control the votes better.
Well for news about the platform, the important follows are @ned, @sneak, @steemitblog, @steemdevs. If you want to follow the other creator who is no longer part of the project then @dan and @dantheman are accounts to follow too.
Witness voting is tied in to how much SP you have, so ultimately, our votes as minnows don't mean a whole lot. Here is how the voting looks for the top 50 witnesses. This chart is from steemreports.com:
Those Big Dark Blue Lines are the voting power of @freedom who pretty much can single handedly make or take Top 20 status to or from a witness. the @freedom vote is proxied to @pumpkin, so Pumkin is doing the witness voting for freedom. Pumpkin is an active witness vote changer, so if a Top 20 really went dormant, he or she would lose that @freedom vote in a hurry.
The light blue at the end encompasses ALLLLL the rest of us. So when we combine a lot of minnows, we can be as powerful as Freedom, so I am not trying to say our votes don't count. But when it comes to removing a top 20 witness, there are a few people who have to see it and take action on it and that witness will be demoted in a hurry.
Hope that helps!
Ah.
This might be the most incredible response to a question ever.
This is extremely helpful, I had no idea any one person had so much power... but it's also probably a good thing too... I'm glad quick action can be taken if required. I've learnt so much about this platform and yet I still make huge leaps and bounds in my Steem-knowledge every day.
They might take our @pumpkin, but they will never take our @freedom!