Did you notice the title of the @steemitblog post was changed this morning?
I'm glad @ned realized HF20 was not a success (even by his loose standards), but, shouldn't he have known that before they made the post? Shouldn't the code have been tested before being released to production? The issue was immediately obvious upon release. That's sad.
Yes, HF20 was an absolute FAIL by today's software development standards and will likely bring more bad press for Steem.
As I've said before, relying on these amateurs hired by Steemit to keep this blockchain alive, will be the death of Steem.
It's time for our top 20 witness (who btw, are controlled by a single voting account) to step up and actually do something with the funds they are bringing in. Or, y'all can keep barely feeding the money tree, complying with all of @ned's wishes, and just wait for it to whither away.
The choice is yours, I know what I'd do.
Sadly have to agree... This HF feels like a complete fail for now... And i am afraid more bugs may come with the time... I just keep hoping for the best
I've been trying to stay optimistic in the past 15 months I've been here. It seems like the deployment of this hardfork was the single biggest oversight I've witnessed since I've been involved with Steem.
I know it's easy to complain, but if something huge doesn't change regarding development organization I won't be able to support this blockchain that strongly with confidence. From what I've seen, there's a ton of resistance to change. Does DPoS have to mean a close-knit circle which any vocal dissenters are kicked out of? Because that sucks, people that see things differently are often times the most helpful to the overall success of a project.
I know finding competent blockchain developers is tough in any case since it's such a new field. But as an investor I'd like to know if there are dedicated segments of the team, like a unit for testing out and introducing new code, a unit for monitoring current code, and one for extensively using different testnets to make 110% sure there are no major issues.
Maybe they have these, but the communication is poor so that most people are in the dark. From what I've gathered, if you're not in the top 20 witnesses, even some of the most talented developers and witnesses are totally in the dark!
I also wish all of the top 20 witnesses had extensive developer knowledge, I mean, isn't that supposed to be one of the main requirements?
It was the job of the witnesses to say no to the code if they didn't feel it was safe.
That doesn't work with the "fake nice" problem I was talking about. Witnesses have the same problem, they are afraid to make their own decision as you will lose witness votes if you don't conform to the decisions made by the top 20. There are other issues at play as well.
Not quite that simple. Top witnesses participate in a secret slack and are all on board with whatever goes on in there. I just know of it... I've not seen it, nor been invited to it.
I don't know what that has to do with reviewing the code before deploying it? Maybe you can explain.
The new code can be deployed and the fork accepted by a super-majority of the top-20 witnesses. The rest of the witnesses do not factor into it. If those witnesses outside of the top-20 do not then upgrade to the new fork, they will effectively become defunct.
So, sure - anyone can review the code. But if the people in the top-20 are going to blindly accept it anyway, there's nothing that the rest of the witnesses can do. You either go along with it or shut down your node.
And if you're in the secret Slack, you play by Ned's rules or you're ousted. So...guess what those people decide to do?
Actually, I've mentioned you twice this morning. I saw that you actually posted and discussed your concerns. I think that was the right thing to do.
Even if I don't always agree with all you say and do, you acted with integrity on this one.
Yes, @ats-david had a very in depth post on his blog about his concerns that I really didn't see elsewhere. I was surprised he was one of the tiny few.
There are too many lines of code to look for oddities... It's humanly impossible to study.
The only way to test it, is to run data through it. Not just "live" data as @timcliff mentioned in a previous reply to me.
(Apparently testnet gets live data sent to it, the same data flowing in the steem mainnet)
...but tainted data. Horribly corrupt data. Throw everything at it.
This is correct when there are massive updates that are backed up for over 18 months and pushed out by the devs as a blob. It is not the case when there are smaller targeted updates (such as the one release a few months ago to address some json spamming attack). The latter are more closely scrutinized by witnesses (not all of whom, but some of whom, have a software development background and are capable of reviewing code to a reasonable degree). Carefully reviewing and second guessing 18 months of design and development work that occurs largely behind a private and opaque process just isn't possible.
Either we flat out reject the release and insist that it be (re)packaged in small bite size pieces to be individually approved (and indeed a minority of witnesses is strongly in favor of this approach) or, absent some known, identified reasons to reject it (for example, stability considerations prompted by the recent crash was seen as such as reason by a minority of witnesses) or we pass it through on the basis of assuming that the dev team is competent. (If they are not, then the Steem community ought to be seriously working to replacing or restructuring it). All of which needs to be considered as a tradeoff between conservatism and 'best practices' on the one hand and the practical consideration of availability of upgraded features on the other (and numerous devs and community members were communicating to witnesses how important many of these upgrades were perceived to be, representing a clear incentive to get them rolled out).
Mostly, things are working now, and the upgrade glitches lasted about 1 day (exchange downtime is fully up to the exchanges, and nothing prevents them from being up; the necessary fixes was released to them yesterday). Whether getting the feature improvements out in deployment was the right call relative to stability risk will be something that time will tell.
Exactly what I thought when I read that last pre HF20 post by Steemitblog.
Cg
Yes, I agree. I'm going to be looking at changing my witness votes around significantly (but does it even matter when @freedom can strong arm anyone it wants into the top 20?)
Someone who has millions and millions of dollars worth of Steem at stake should have a much bigger say than you. However, your votes absolutely do count (just not to the same degree, as it should be), so please use them.
Of course that makes sense. And yeah, I always use all 30 of my votes. Shifted them around quite significantly today, too, based on what I observed during the past couple of weeks.
I wish we could revisit some of the suggestions made in this post from 10 months ago where @steemitblog asked for input, and then seemingly very few or none of them were implemented.
I especially liked the idea of an adjustable slider for curation % on posts. If not that, I believe an increase in general is needed, either to 33.33%, 37.5%, or 50%.
As with everything there are tradeoffs. Community input is great, but at the same time a full time dev team has its own (hopefully) coherent vision on how the system should evolve. Possibly, such a coherent vision is preferable to a hodgepodge of (even individually good) ideas. Some community-sourced ideas can be implemented without disrupting a development roadmap, but not necessarily all.
If you feel strongly that the approach being taken is the wrong one then please continue to express that (including via witness votes, but not only that).
Yeah, I know what you mean. But, with all due respect, what we have now comes off as a hodge-podge of random ideas thrown together. Devs aren't renowned for their social skills, but it would be nice if there was a whole liaison team that tried to convey that vision to the overall Steemit community, not just @andrarchy. Maybe then it would seem more cohesive.
I guess a major difficulty in the whole thing is that it's hard to bridge the gap between programmer knowledge and concepts a layman can understand. Nonetheless, I'll keep doing my best to try to grasp why things work the way they do and keep questioning if they really ought to be that way. Thanks @smooth.
Speaking of shifting witness votes around, I have not been able to unvote witnesses for months now. Once I vote for a witness, trying to unvote them just makes the upvote icon spin for hours without actually unvoting them.
Yes, I'm logged in with my active key,
Do you have any idea how to fix this? I've contacted github about it an never got a response.
Hmmm, that's very odd. I've never heard of that and don't know of a fix, but let me ask around @luzcypher.
@freedom uses @pumpkin as witness voting proxy. For the top 20 witnesses, @pumpkin voted 17. Without @pumpkin's vote, 13 witnesses won't be in top 20.
The conclusion is our votes do not make difference.
Woah
Ouch!
Slowly getting through the debates here and... please consider @stem.witness - the brand new witness from @steemSTEM. We have a new Standalone app on the way and an unimaginable amount of stuff coming up!
I think with/after the upcoming SMT hardfork (will it be a HF?) many of us will decide wether to stay here or leave. Stinc needs to get their shit together.
Yeah, and I agree with @ats-david and others who question whether SMTs is even something that
matters at allshould even be done. I'd be more likely to care about things that make STEEM more attractive and useful to the average person. Communities, improve the front-end, video hosting, third-party built in instant messaging, Android and iOs apps, etc. etc.Also why do we keep the ridiculous reverse bidding system at all? It's so confusing and counterintuitive to have to wait to vote on something for your vote to be effective. I know it's to counter bots being able to snipe everything at minute zero, but 15 minutes is still too long in our fast-paced culture.
My concerns about SMTs go far beyond whether they'll "matter at all." I actually think that they potentially represent a huge risk to the Steem blockchain and its users, both legally and financially/economically.
When you start introducing the possibility of ICOs (many of which are considered "securities" by the SEC) and an internal token exchange (where each exchange of a token may be considered a taxable event by the IRS), you begin wading into territory that is begging for government scrutiny and forced compliance from regulators...the very things that these blockchains and cryptocurrencies were supposed to try to avoid.
Not to mention the fact that the ability to create shitcoins and trade them on the blockchain will add a potentially enormous amount of bloat without necessarily adding any real value.
It's a huge risk that should not be considered lightly. And once it goes forward, there's no rolling it back, because of the financial and potential regulatory aspects of it.
I am very happy I vote for your witness.
Steemit suffers from the same failings most businesses fall into such as exclusivity of hierarchy, lack of communication, and partial deafness. It is important for the flaws to be pointed out in hopes of or in an effort to enact change. The more voices constructively talking about those flaws the better i think.
this is my feeling as well. with SMTs come things like jerrybanfield coins. A whole wave of useless tokens that get one person rich, where they cash out and move to the next scam.
how will SMTs incentivize an average user to adopt steemit, as opposed to addressing that some 95% of value on the platform is held by some 1%? or that nobody actually reads anything on here?
Which jurisdiction is Steem the blockchain under? Is each node under the jurisdiction of the country/state/whatever where it's physically located? How are the witness nodes geographically located?
Shitcoin bloat is a huge concern of mine. What people ate just dying to make their own new tokens? Scammers and fools.
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I always felt SMT's were based on the premise that we live in an ideal world where everyone happens to be an honest entrepreneur who sees the potential in monetizing a comment box on Quora.com or whatever.
But using Steem as a sociological experiment, we can really get a great perspective to what huge extent individuals on a global scale are willing to milk, milk, milk at every corner. SMTs are going to be an open floodgate... to what, remains to be seen...
(Vote our new @stem.witness - witness of @steemstem, your favourite circle jerk)
freedom's identity has been discussed a couple of times previously, still no one is sure. Isn't it either Dan's or Ned's?
Big shock when I found out yesterday.
Hum !
Is he part of the top 20 witnesses ?
If so we know who he is.
I was waiting to see what you have to say as soon as you got a post through, I assume there will be more in the coming days.
So sad, and so true...
Everyones VP being reseted to zero was a big fuckup.
People leasing steem, and projects like utopian, are in a really bad situation now...
I am getting screwed. I paid for leases that are completely useless. I was barely covering them in order to grow the cycling community. Now I'm just out on my investments.
Yep. What company would feel safe having millions vested here and having this happen. Then they're told "don't worry, your funds are safe!" Ummm... except for the thousands of dollars in revenue that were lost by 1) downtime 2)resetting VP to 20%. It's a joke.
That's the obvious reason that a complete power down needs 13 weeks...it's like a prison
Serious investors would have moved their funds asap after this mess (at least those who would also be active in Steemit too and not only steem)...and one more reason serious investors won't power up...meaning steem's price will need way more than we think to climb high...
Just saying...
It takes every ounce of self-control for me to be rational on this, because I essentially lost six figures by believing in STEEM and not powering down in December. Whales lost MUCH more. Prison, for sure: though one of our own accepting, and it does provide the useful safeguard against people dumping STEEM when things like just happened occur.
I can imagine....
Reduction of that 13 week period would be a huge step to steem's success if you ask me. Because lot's of steem holders are also Steemit users... There are cases that you feel that you just don't have control over your funds...
did you know that the power down was originally 104 weeks? legit 2 years
I'm just going to chip in here. As you mentioned @ssjsasha the original powerdown was 104 weeks.
The thinking behind it is that it works as a delegated proof of stake. In other words, other investors gain confidence knowing that Steem cannot be dumped uber quickly.
Don't forget that Steemit arose right in the midst of the pump-n-dump ICOs. Investors come in, buy up loads of ICO coins. Devs and their friends dump coins and leave all the new investors (bag holders) high and dry.
So 104 weeks was considered a great way to show investors that this wouldn't happen with Steem.
It was later forked to 13 weeks, along with other changes to SP that gave holders of less than 100,000 SP a vote that would register over $0.01.
Imagine if you could just take out all your Steem at once. Can you imagine what the price would be doing right now?
13 weeks is not a prison. You go into it with your eyes wide open and it is not that long. Obviously it leaves you vulnerable to downward price fluctuations. However I think they'd be far greater if everyone was trying to take their money out all at once.
That is neither shady nor unique. There are plenty of legit coins that you can only buy with other crypto. In fact most of them fall under this category, and it is very much the decision of the exchange where the Steem is held.
Ho hum, anyway, I agree with the both of you that HF20 was a disaster. Plus not being able to sell was particularly annoying. Hopefully in another few days it will be like nothing ever happened. 🤞😉
Cg
You've hit one of two nails on the head as to why I've not invested into Steemit. The other is that it's not exactly easy to directly invest into, having to buy bitcoin, dogecoin, lightcoin or dash first then invest that coin into Steem is another. Looks exceptionally shady to not be able to directly invest.
Shadier still not being able to withdraw my investments earned quickly.
Even shadier still with the development being shite like that. A crash a week prior, then the HF20 fork screwing things up further, it's a trainwreck. It's why I'm going to automate my posting after today. Setting up all the automation now.
ahh dude.. it's not just STEEM it's bitcoin in general. Just being "fair"
still waiting.
Yeah, I would have lost it in any crypto. And I was being stubborn to sell like "Why should I hold it in USD? I don't believe in fiat!" but I didn't realized how dominated I was by emotion on that. Because I could have bought back 5 to 10x what I had in crypto.
same when I bought gold back in 2009. Fiat games are the standard. Just have some insurance in both crypto, gold/silver/metals, and even CASH. If Japan can do it for 20+ years, the USA can do it as well. I have written numerous 0.20 cents articles on steemit about if I cannot go int a grocery store and pay with crypto.. then it's strictly insurance/speculation/asset whatever. Sure it could go up +++ but that's the speculation part.. and I ALWAYS have to cash into local fiat currency to eat.
remember I said I wanted to invest every paycheck into steem power until I hit 10,000? well I have not started yet... my gut feeling hasn't told me to invest yet so I will continue the waiting game.... large upvotes are still welcome lol
I'm a little bit scared to invest by this point...
The witnesses have just as much responsibility as SteemIt, Inc. If they had issues or weren't comfortable with the code they shouldn't have dropped it, I really think there needs to be a post-mortem review.
I know we will sort it out, but it certainly made me thankful I do not hold a large stake. If I had a couple of million on here, I would have been sick.
Witnesses have expressed a lot of concern about the development process, especially the delivery of 18-month bags of code changes by one company operating mostly in private (albeit with some degree of partial visibility via github) as one single hard fork release. In the end it becomes a take it or leave it decision, where leaving it means that new features wanted by many in the community (for example, liquid beneficiary rewards, discounted/free accounts to grow the user base, etc.) don't happen either. I would say given 1-5 days of glitches where things are already working a lot better, whether the wrong decision was made is not really clear yet, but many would agree that the process is not at all ideal.
I have 3 k and I was sick... thank god there are places where you can diversify a bit.
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Stop shilling Weku, it's fucking trash.
You are 100% correct.... I learned the hard way.... I apologize. My stuff being stolen and posted in WEKU ... what a mess.
Embedded in every of your criticism, is the brutal truth. And I am really concerned why the powers that be ain't heeding your words of wisdom. Dammit!
You should have a say in the decision making in Steemit. I have realized that all your past rants are all making sense to me now.
Soon you’ll realize that it is not the fork that bends but yourself
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Matrix?!
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LOL spot on
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The software was tested and we were aware that a normalization process would have to occur when the swith was flipped to HF20... However we grossly underestimated how long the normalization would take and ultimately didn't realize how vastly the RC implementation would slow things like posting and voting initially..
As a former top 20 witness and a current backup witness (who is in the "secret slack" as some put it) I'd have to state that we weren't exactly meaning to bring in these issues to the network and as stated above didn't foresee the implications that slowed the network down to a crawl shortly after the HF.
This was a soft Spork 20. Every day this place is less fun and discord get's better and better.
What would you do if you couldn't transact in any form for 14 years? Or even 200+ years?
I wouldn't be calling that a success if I knew my system was responsible
The hard fork exposed how centralized this supposedly "decentralized" platform really is. If I was the lead on a platform like Utopian or Dtube when this happened; I would already be looking for ways to completely decouple my system from steem.
In the corporate world, when a company releases a patch that causes their clients to lose this kind of revenue; usually one of two things happens. The company rolls back the patch until they can fix the problems or the platform is abandoned by the clients and some of them seek reprehensions via legal channels. If the platform wasn't masquerading as a decentralized system then I'll bet that some of these companies would be seeking liability damages.
"seek reprehensions via legal channels". yup. Class action lawsuit.
Where's the popcorn when you need it?
!popcorn
Popcorn bot is too weak to reply
The witnesses decided to run the code so they already voted on it. I like Steemit just fine.
I was giving Steemit the benefit of the doubt. I tried to post and it said I had to buy more Steem Power to get resource credits. I powered up 1 Steem and my resource credits decreased. Thanks for nothing. This is a little scary.
So now I can only make 15 comments a day? How much will anyone have to spend on this platform to do anything. It isn't like the rewards are that big.
I am afraid my account will froze permanently if I upvote so I will only resteem this.
I didn't notice the title changed, but that's interesting.
I just wrote a post about how I saw this coming. Have a look bernie.
To state the obvious, there's no incentive for top 20 witnesses to do anything while there's no competition for votes. Still, it's hard to believe no one ran simulations and stress tests on a testnet.
Nice tags, btw!
Word on the street is, only perhaps 15% of our top-20 witnesses even participated in the testnet. (I have not independently confirmed this because nobody with that info is willing to share it.) But I believe all of the top-20 witnesses except one was already upgraded to 0.20.2 by Monday.
They are being paid far too much to do far too little.
...and we still can't transfer steem to exchange wallets, absolutely no word on that. Zero, zilch, nothing, nathan, nada.
Cg
I would assume that this will take at least a few days for the first wallets to come back online. More realistically, we should be talking about a few weeks for a majority of them to work again, if not longer.
Wow, that will ruin me...
I don't know what to do. I would have been nice to get some kind of warning. 😥😪😪😪
Cg
My comments are based on how quickly exchanges updated their wallets in the past. It’s possible that they’re more responsive now, but I remain pessimistic. We can only wait and see...and hope.
True, thank you for being realistic with me, better that than false hope!
Luckily I have just discovered Blocktrades is operational and that if you don't use BTC their fees aren't too bad. Still not great, but not as terrible as the Bitcoin rates.
Phew!
Cg
Been waiting for this post.
I can also confirm its complete with a lot of problems!
I just claimed some SBDS and SP and my voting power fell to 42.27% from 100%.....damn
This is my first post/comment after the HF20 and not sure how it will affect my RCs...
I also noticed something unusual with the RC with this 2 pics below.
Before Claiming Balance
After Claiming Balance
My Observation
RC Manabar increased as you can see
Voting Manabar Also Mana Increased!!
Who can explain this to me....Hope things dont drastically change after posting this comment!
Everyones VP was reseted to zero.
The 100% shown on steemd was using the old calculation.
After you voted (or in your case, increased the current mana by claiming rewards), the bar started to use the new calculation.
Shit part is that we all need to wait 4 more days to get 100% VP.
Also, you manabar % increased because you increased you current mana by increasing you SP.
If I get this right
We are the guinea pigs.
Testing the system and learn right on the blockchain
4 days wow that’s a stunner.
We should be all compensated with delegated SP FROM #steemit
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Hahaha indeed we need to be compensated
I haven't done one single vote and my voting power keeps dropping for no apparent reason... This is complete screwed...
the most forked coin in history
Yes it is true :)
I have a lot of mushrooms for share.
Totally fucking right. Top witnesses have the capacity and responsibility (to a certain degree, since STEEM is providing to them) to set up a real project and generate true competition.
It's nice to be able to use this platform again. Thank you for sharing @berniesanders!
Now, that's not nice.... lol. They've had a hard day...
A very good post and a very thoughtful thought.
Yeah Hardfork Successful" -> "Hardfork Complete
It's terrible on my side, voting has been preposterous, it's a fail for me too
Sometimes to make an omelet you have to break eggs. This major hiccup is behind us now (I hope) and I'm sure some valuable lessons were learned on the best way to prepare ingredients. Time will tell
HF20 is the biggest failure. It has almost destroyed the Steem platform. It showed my RC in minus. I was not able to claim rewards, upvote anyone and post a single comment. Now, it's ok but when I upvoted just two posts (including this), my voting power dropped from 100% to 23%. What a f*k! Yesterday, $3 worth upvote on my post became $0.15. Who is responsible for this loss?
STINC really stinks.
I would have some questions, if you just pass by some top 20 witnesses..
https://steemit.com/questionnaire/@isnochys/hf20---witness-questionnaire
HF Succesfully Completed .
Just upvoted this post and my voting power dropped from 100% down to 21%. What a disaster. Do we really think this problem is going to solve itself after 5 days? What if I would of waited 5 days to try and vote? Would I then have to wait another 5 days for my voting power to recover?
So many questions, so little answers....
So everything fine now?
These RCs are stopping @orbitdrop to resteem music in the #boombox tag. Its unfiar, not fun fair....unfair
I think it will be good for us.
That title 'successful' was a bit of an overreach
Can someone explain to me again why we have witnesse if all interfaced use the steemit node and if nearly nothing works without it.
So I don't like linking to my post, but you might appreciate it since I took some screen shots from yesterday's debacle.. one of which includes ned's face and claim of "success". If you're interested, click that link; or you can just visit my blog the old fashioned way.
I believe the top priority of the top witnesses is pleasing pumpkin
No one ever saw the bugs coming.
But it's funny how official made it clear that the code been tested before scheduling it.
It's awesome Hf20.3 is out and we are beginning to post again.
Anyways @berniesanders , you hoping on the witnesses ?
i think what am gonna say will summarize everything!
Hardforked or Hardfucked?
What do you think about Weku ? It looks like a pre-Fork Steemit Clone to me .. (Rip-off) . Do you know who is behind it ??? .... update: just learned people on WEKU stealing all my posts. sucks big time.
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I've actually spoken with a few of the Weku developers, they're exceptionally knowledgeable when it comes to blockchain technology, IPFS node integration and honestly made me confident in the Weku platform. I was also surprised with how knowledgeable they were with the nodes of the Freenet Project in how not only it functioned itself but also it's various third party plugins like Sone. With that kind of knowledge I'm comfortable with Weku.
Thanks... but it looks like they just took the Steemit Code and renamed it WEKU... did they pay @dan and @ned for this code ?
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Steemit is open source, anyone can make a fork of it, even I have a copy on my SD. Did I pay Canonical when I made a fork of Ubuntu? No.
Ahh... ok thanks. I did know how this worked. Thanks for the explanation.
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No problem :) Steemit is just open source, you can view it on Github. Check it out yourself.
Just learned the hard way.... Weku filled with scammers and people stealing all my stuff. What a @##$$&* mess.
I've said that multiple times myself, as a developer of not only games but AI and live closed captioning algorithms for speech recognition, I was appalled by how poorly HF20 was implemented, especially with having had a blockchain crash barely a week prior to the upgrade. Might as well have been another crash.
Hell I found the fucking cause of the god damn crash before the witnesses and all allegedly even figured it out. This is sad. Actually it's sadder than sad, it's fucking depressive.
I've lost faith in Steemit as a platform, as a result I'm primarily going to start focusing on just cross posting to Steemit through automated means rather than creating content specifically for the platform. It's not worthy my time, energy nor effort.
Ah ha ...yeah. I read that post yesterday and was like, "successful" and "as expected"? So you expected for 99% of the users to be locked out and thought that was fine?