Yesterday @steemitblog published a first proposal for the next hardfork, 0.17. There are a few significant changes to the whole platform and a very specific one that I consider a game changer. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
What follows is my attempt to "translate" the technical lingo into every day user information and to give my own feedback about the proposal. The feedback will come in the form of a short motivation and a priority number, from 1 to 10+, 10+ being the highest. The higher the priority, the faster that change should be implemented. I will also keep the structure of the initial post, which had 2 sections: Simplifications and New Features. Bear with me, as the post may get quite long.
Simplification
1. Removing Over Posting Reward Penalties:
Translation: anyone can post as many posts as he / she wants and they may get rewards, if they are voted. Currently, you can publish as many posts as you want, but only the first 4 are eligible for rewards.
Feedback: +9, Throttling posts to 4 payable per day may have played a significant role in the somehow slow growth of the platform. If there's no incentive to write more than 4 posts, why doing it?
2. Single Payout Period
Translation: payout for posts / comments will come after 7 days, and nothing after that. Right now there are two time windows: the first 24 hours and then the next 30 days.
Feedback: +9, I wrote extensively about this one and even suggested that authors who want to get rewards past 30 days to pay a hosting fee. It supports engagement and posts really good can be monetized better.
3. Comment Payout independent of Discussion
Translation: paying comments exactly 7 days after they were posted, not when the root post has to be paid.
Feedback: 8+, It will allow even late commenters to have a fair time window to collect rewards.
4. Removing the Comment Nesting Limit
Translation: Unlimited nesting depth to comments. Currently, 6 is the maximum depth nesting level. As I understand, the maximum level of depth should be set up for each site using the blockchain, at the UI level.
Feedback: 8+ It's annoying at times and it's a shame because, most of the time, the comments are just as good as the posts, if not better.
4. Allow Editing of any Past Post or Comment
Translation: The ability to make modifications to your posts or comments beyond the 30 days limitation that is in place right now.
Feedback: 10+, No comment about this one, it should have been a given from day one.
5. Normalize Payout Rates
Translation: I have a really hard time understanding this myself, so there won't be any translation. Most likely, this affects the blockchain at a deeper, more technical level that we, as users, didn't even realize there was such a thing.
Feedback: +1, probably.
6. Removing Proof of Work
Translation: no more Steem mining
Feedback: - 10+ It was just about time, the mining queue has been dominated for months by ASIC miners.
7. Remove Bandwidth Rate limiting from Consensus
Translation: if a user doesn't have enough bandwidth, the transaction (being it a vote, a post or a transfer) doesn't get picked up by a witness, hence, it's not included in the blockchain. You can't participate unless you get enough steem power / bandwidth.
Feedback: 6+. This is a double edged sword and it depends a lot on the implementation. What does this mean in practice is that a witness who holds a large amount of power can sponsor new accounts to post transactions (publishing, commenting, transferring funds). The new accounts don't need to have any bandwidth, as it is right now.
New Features
1. Multiple Arbitrary Beneficiaries to Reward Payouts
Translation: if you want to integrate Steem with your own blog, you could do it in such a way that you will control (in percentages): how much you get for each article, how much a commenter gets and even how much a guest poster on your blog could earn. For blogging communities like Medium, this means they could integrate Steem in their own business logic, with their own percentages .
Feedback: 10+. That's closely linked to the comment payout independent rewards pool below and I think this is the single most important change that this hardfork will bring in. To my own understanding, it means that anyone could create a "layer" on top of the steemit blockchain. At this layer level, the layer owner will be in charge of implementing the transactions (posting, commenting) and how the rewards are split. Use case: a SteemOverflow, or a QuoraSteem kind of site, where the importance post versus comment is upside down. If this gets implemented it means that even independent bloggers, like me, can create a way to give rewards to people commenting on their own blogs. If that happens, and if the implementation is solid and secure, then that's the starting point for Steemit being one of the biggest players in the social media today. Mark my words.
2. Independent Comment Reward Pool
Translation: comments should have a fixed share from the reward pool, in percentages, that will be split equally across all comments in a given payout period.
Feedback: 6+ The proposed share from the rewards pool, 35%, is way too big. It may be a politically driven measure to encourage engagement, but it won't happen because of this. As it is right now, Steemit is an author's tribe, not a StackOverflow or a Quora. But having comments rewards separated from the author rewards is a good measure and is something that goes very well with the ability to set up the payments independently by the provider. In other words, this percentage shuldn't be set up at the blockchain level, but at the business level. See the entry above.
3. Separate Market and Rewards Balance from Checking and Savings
Translation: as far as I understand, this means that we will have two accounts, one in which we will get the rewards, and one with which we will place market orders (sell, buy, transfer). We will be able to transfer transparently from one account to another .
Feedback: 7+ if this doesn't take too much time, I will give it a reasonably high priority. I think it doesn't really matter for end user that much, but for the way the blockchain works, this could be perceived as a significant advantage.
Overall Considerations
If implemented in the form described above, these changes will have at least 3 major consequences.
Less cognitive overload on users. 99% of the people don't want to deal with concepts like bandwidth, proof of work, Rshares and Vshares. By simplifying the access to the platform (bandwidth limitation removal) and enforcing a more transparent and profitable rewards window (a week) members will have more time to write, to interact and to promote their own work inside and outside the platform. That's good.
More freedom inside the platform. By removing the bandwidth limit, witnesses and network operators are getting more power. Elimination of POW means that you can't interact with Steem other than being a witness or a writer (mining is over). Usually, when people get more power, interesting things are happening. I think this can go either way.
Logarithmic growth potential for the platform. Because we will be able to build custom transactions, splitting the payout arbitrarily between the authors, the host or the tool provider, virtually anybody could implement a Steem-based solution for blogging, either solo or in a pool. If this takes off, then the sky is the limit.
What are your thoughts? What's the most important change for you?