Over the weekend some of our community code reviewers discovered some issues with the 0.14.0 release. The elected witnesses opted to stay on version 0.13.0 until we could make the necessary changes.
We are happy to report that Steem 0.14.1 is now available. Assuming the supermajority of the elected witnesses upgrade by Tuesday, 20 Sep 2016 15:00:00 UTC the new features will take effect. These features include: Escrow, Savings, Steem Dollar stability, and more. Please see the release notes for more details.
Hardfork Process
A hardfork is a change in the business logic that powers Steem. The Steem network has many checks and balances to ensure everything is vetted by a decentralized group of trusted (elected) individuals before taking effect. No hardfork will take effect until at least 67% of the active witnesses have upgraded to 0.14.1 and it will take effect no earlier than Tue, 20 Sep 2016 15:00:00 UTC.
Just because Steemit, Inc releases a new version of code does not mean that everyone is forced to upgrade to the new code. It is this review process that caused our prior release (0.14.0) to be rejected by the witnesses.
Once a supermajority of active witnesses upgrade the hardfork takes effect at the appointed time. Steemit, Inc attempts to give all parties ample time to upgrade their machines so that the changeover is seamless. Any exchanges that do not upgrade will automatically be taken offline by the existing consensus logic. Assuming everything works as designed there will never be a minority fork created by 0.13.0 nodes.
Voting Power Algorithm Unchanged
Due to feedback from the community we have decided to exclude changes in how voting power is determined. It is clear that we did not communicate our intentions nor the expected result in a way that everyone can get behind.
It is still our desire to rebalance the voting power to maximize the influence ordinary users have relative to automated users. We intend to document and communicate our enhanced solutions.
Thank You
We would like to thank everyone who is helping to review the code, catch bugs, and submit pull requests. It is a pleasure to work with such an engaged community.