Increased Voting Power Precision Will Come With The Next Hardfork - Tackling Growth Pains

Voting in the Steem ecosystem is based on a few variables.

One of them is voting power, and, in the current implementation, it is set to decrease with 10% for every vote at full power it allows only 10 full power votes per day.

Which brings us to the following situation: if someone has only 2% voting power left, AND sets his voting power at 2%, what happens?

In the current "under the hood" implementation, the way these numbers are rounded are capping the total votes in the above scenario at 2000k per day.

If you're a regular John Doe, this is more than enough. But if you are using the platform at a deeper level, this comes up as a limitation. It's like the numbers are too coarse to let you fine tune your thing.

If you're wondering who needs this amounts of votes per day, let's just think at a brand new app built on top of the Steem blockchain, like eSteem, chainBB or busy. All of these are actually acting like a thin governance layer on top of their own user base and, if they want to support their users with "dust" votes, they're limited in the current implementation. Another use case are spam fighting bots, which need to deploy an immense amount of activity (read: voting) to cope with hundreds of thousands of spam comments.

So, for the next hardfork (I presume it will be 0.20.0) there is a new proposal to increase the precision of how voting power is calculated. This change won't affect the algorithm itself, the vote power depletion will continue at the same rate, but it will create the ability to cast way more votes at very low voting power, allowing for more control in situations like the ones described above.

While this, again, won't affect regular users, it is a clear sign of "growth pains" that are tackled now by the Steem developers.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):

• Rewards: Were Does The Money Come From?
• Netiquette: How To Avoid Being A Steem Douche?
• Witnesses: What Are They And Why Should You Care?
• How Can I Mine Steem And What CPU / GPU Power Do I Need For That?
• The Beginner Guide To Not Getting Hacked On Steemit