Hello Steemians!
We have officially published our pre-release version of the next hardfork (0.19.0), codenamed “Equality,” the purpose of which is to make everyone’s influence directly proportional to their stake (as opposed to the existing system in which influence is exponentially related). Our blockchain wizards refer to this as using a “linear rewards curve” a change that received widespread support from both non-technical community members as well as our blockchain witnesses.
Curation Rewards and Vote Impact
There are two other changes within the update that affect non-technical community members: 1. Changing to a square root curation rewards curve and 2. Increasing vote impact.
Curation Rewards
The change to the curation rewards curve will not have a noticeable impact on curation rewards and is necessary simply to prevent the linear reward curve changes from having a material impact on curation rewards.
Vote Impact
The changes to the impact of a 100% vote are more material. A 100% vote will be 4 times more powerful once HF19 is completed. As it stands now a single 100% vote uses only 0.5% of your remaining voting power (voting power regenerates fully over a 5 day period). That means real users would need to vote 40 times a day at full power to use all of their voting power. This leaves users who are less active unable to fully leverage their voting power. After this change, a single 100% vote will use 2% of your remaining voting power, meaning that 10 full-power votes a day will now exhaust the majority of your voting power. Of course, if one does not wish to use this much voting power in a single vote, anyone is still free to lower the power-percentage of their votes accordingly.
Users can also feel free to simply upvote-at-will because a vote only consumes a percentage of the remaining voting power, not the total. Imagine “voting power” as a swimming pool that is constantly being refilled by the rain. Every time you upvote you reduce the amount of water (in this case “voting power”) from the pool by a percentage (i.e. it’s not like you are constantly removing 500 gallons from the lake). The next time you vote you are removing another percentage from an already diminished supply. That means there are still no limits on how much you can vote, just that the more you vote the more you incrementally decrease the amount of voting power you have (the water in the pool). To get a better sense of how powerful your votes are and the rate at which that power diminishes simply observe how much your full power upvotes increase the rewards of content creators and you should get an intuitive sense of how the algorithm works.
You can read the release notes below or view them on github here: https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases/tag/v0.19.0rc1
The Steemit Team
Steem Equality 0.19.0 Release Notes
The hardfork has yet to be scheduled
All witnesses should carefully and thoroughly review 0.19.0rc1.
Reindexing
0.19.0 requires reindexing from all previous versions.
Overview
This Hardfork is about changing the rewards curve to be stake proportional. The original proposal can be read on steemit.com.
Linear Rewards
With the introduction of a linear reward curve everyone will have a say directly proportional to their stake. #1051
Square Root Curation Rewards Curve
This is to offset the changes in rewards due to the linear reward curve. Curation rewards should stay roughly where they are. #1052
Increase Vote Impact
Each vote's impact has been increased by 4x. #1053
Witness Price Feeds Properly Expires
Fixed a bug that prevented price feeds from expiring. #882
Historical Posts Cannot Be Deleted
Once a post has existed for 7 days, it can no longer be deleted. #876
Cancelling a Steem Power Delegation Fixed
Fixed a bug that prevented cancelling a delegation in some circumstances #971
Deleting Post Condition Part of Consensus
Previously, requiring a post had 0 rshares before deletion was enforced via a soft fork. Now it is part of consensus #977
account_create_operation Fixed
There was a bug in the account_create_operation. Our short term fix was to temporarily disable the operation. It has been fixed and is re-enabled. #987
Fixed 0 Delegation Objects
Previously, creating an account with 100% STEEM would create a 0 delegation object. This has been fixed. #997