New Features Included in latest Hardfork
1) Escrow Transfer
What is Escrow?
Escrow generally refers to money held by a third-party on behalf of transacting parties. An escrow is a financial arrangement where a third party holds and regulates payment of the funds required for two parties involved in a given transaction. It helps make transactions more secure by keeping the payment in a secure escrow account which is only released when all of the terms of an agreement are met as overseen by the escrow company.
Why the need for Escrow?
An escrow account is essentially a holding tank. During a STEEM & STEEM DOLLAR transaction, the escrow service holds all the important financial assets and deposits while the buyer and seller work out the details.
Once the terms have been accepted by all parties, the funds are considered to be “in escrow”. Once in this state the sender can release funds to the receiver, or the receiver can return the funds to the sender. If either the sender or receiver has issues they can raise a dispute at which point in time the escrow agent has authority to release some or all of the funds to either the sender or the receiver. If no action is taken for a specified period of time, then the funds are released to the receiver.
2) Savings Accounts
What is Steemit New Security Vault ?
Savings accounts allow you to protect your liquid STEEM and STEEM DOLLARS in the event your account is hacked / stolen. All transfers out of savings accounts have a 72 hour delay during which the sender can notice, recover their account & cancel the transfer , an ideal way to minimize the event of a hack. This way Steemit Users will encourage exchanges to adopt Savings accounts as it add's an extra layer of security and ideally curbs liquidity from speculative trading.
This allow Users to lock funds into a contract, it would take 3 days to execute a transaction. An individual will have enough time and opportunity to reverse the withdrawal, meaning if you're hacked it which would be result of a security breach, you can ideally either exhaust the hacker and get your withdrawal or take other action, like making a public announcement on Steemit.com to address the issue .
3) Revoking Voting Permissions
What so special about this new Update?
Revoking Voting Permissions
This feature is useful for those who want the economic benefits from Steem without the legal liability associated with the political influence holding Steem Power grants them.
4) Custom Binary Operations
The semantics are the same as the custom json operation, but with a binary payload. The json deserialization has a non-trivial cost associated with it. This operation will allow for binary deserialization of plugin operations and should improve overall performance of plugins (subchains / sidechains) that chose to use it.
Change of serialization of data will allow improvements for sub-chains and side-chains. This allows developers to start and branch out in the future with their own parameters for their projects.
5) Witness Scheduling Updates
Witnesses that have not produced a block or updated their witness data in at least 24 hours will not be scheduled until they show proof-of-life by updating their witness data. Witnesses can now voluntarily retire from their position at any time. This should improve the overall network reliability and reduce the total number of missed blocks.
Steem 0.14.0 Bug Fixes
Target Votes of 5 per Day instead of 40
@dan and @ned made sure that STEEM 0.14.0 release will greatly improve “normal” users experience:
''We are changing the target number of votes per day from 40 to 5 so that more people keep their voting power below 100%. The purpose of this change is to rebalance power toward normal users and away from bots. You can still vote as often as you like, this change merely impacts the speed at which voting power is consumed.
This means voting power will be reduced for ALL users, not only whales. However, whale´s impact on the total % of the voting distribution will be less than what it is now. Everytime a whale votes on something is redistributing future payouts, taking a percentage away from all posters and giving it to the person he voted for, after the fork whales will only be able to do this 4 times with full power (now they can do it 40).
Benefits of the Bug Fix
Whales will still be able to vote as many time if they want. What the new protocol establishes is that if they vote more than 4 times their voting power will significantly reduced.
Look at it this way, every user gets so much power flowing into their cup. Under current rules most users cups are full and their power goes to waste. Power voters waste less power because they keep their cups less than full.
New rules allow normal people to use more of their power by draining their cup faster with each vote. This means they can capture more of their power.
In the new system, a minnow vote will be more likely to boost up the post by a penny or two because the vote will be 8 times as powerful. There is a price for this though, and that it will burn out their voting power 8 times as fast.
After the fork, highly voted posts should receive better rewards but extremely high payouts could become rarer, making Steemit's rewards more balanced. We may not see a lot of 5k posts anymore but instead we will have lots of $300 posts. More equal Wealth distribution within Steemit.com for content which should have been free in the first place
Steem Dollar Stability
Starting when STEEM DOLLARS are 2% of the market cap, a proportional of content rewards will be awarded as Steem instead of Steem Dollars. The rate at which Steem Dollars are printed is 50% of the reward at 2% or less market cap and 0% at 5% or more market cap, linearly extrapolated from 2%-5% market cap. So, at 3.5% market cap content rewards will be 25% Steem Dollars, 25% Steem, and 50% Steem Power.
When Steem Dollars reach 10% of the market cap, the price feed will jump off the peg to keep Steem Dollars at 10% of the market cap and will return to the peg when the reported price feed goes below 10%. Witnesses should still report the real dollar value of Steem for their price
feed. The median price feed is automatically capped regardless of what witnesses report.
This change is designed to protect the blockchain from a theoretical, but highly unlikely, event where by the SBD debt would completely devalue STEEM. Steem holders are now guaranteed that SBD holders will never be entitled to more than 10% of the market cap.
Benefits of the Bug Fix
Essentially Steemit Developer want to try limiting debt burden on the Steem system .Each STEEM DOLLAR that exists is essential debt that accumulates based on 10% Interests , with Steemit growing more user holding STEEM DOLLAR create more Debt. ( Keep in Mind that 10% is considered reasonably high when compared to most Bank Interests )
If the price of STEEM continues to fall, and the amount of SBD in circulation keeps increasing, we could get to a situation in the future where STEEM DOLLAR holders could call for a lot of extra STEEM to be 'printed'. That's why there is split in STEEM DOLLAR Payout Rewards , to curb growing debt burdens for greater sustainability, Steemit is still in beta so changes are part of the project.
Keep in mind that Steemit splits its rewards;
Curator: 25% of the Rewards: Paid in Steem Power
Creators: 75% of the Rewards: Paid 50:50 in Steem Power and Steem Dollars
If an author's reward is $100, they would get 50% of that in STEEM POWER, 3.3333% in STEEM and $46.66 STEEM DOLLAR
Cleanup of @null
Balances of the null account and zeroed every block. Because any funds in the null account are inaccessible, they are removed every block and the dynamic global property object is updated to reflect the actual totals.
Benefits of the Bug Fix
This will remove funds from the supply, slowing the rate of inflation.
Miscellaneous Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug that was preventing votes from being completely removed from a post.
Posts are now editable up to the second payout when they are archived.
Removed legacy PoW operation from witness plugin.
Increased the irreversible block threshold to 75%.
Source
@steemitblog/announcing-steem-0-14-0-release-candidate
@hisnameisolllie/tuesday-onwards-of-author-rewards-to-be-paid-in-steem
@creationlayer/steemit-update-the-time-is-now-to-get-noticed-and-what-is-it
@hisnameisolllie/steem-sustainable-debt-to-ownership-ratio-explained
