My opinion on the upcoming v17 hardfork.

in #witness-category8 years ago (edited)


For reference on the V17 update, please read this first!

    I have had a few people ask me already if I will be supporting Hardfork 17 as the date draws near. Many other witnesses have come out in with their own thoughts, and each is worth a read to start to understand the current community impression of the fork. Here's a few I chose that I think are worth reading:

@klye -- https://steemit.com/witness-category/@klye/lost-top-19-spot-by-showing-support-for-hf17-and-falling-victim-to-old-boy-mentality-fml
@bhuz -- https://steemit.com/witness-category/@bhuz/my-take-on-hardfork-17
@abit -- https://steemit.com/witness-category/@abit/steem-0-17-0-released-but-i-won-t-upgrade-as-is
@dragosroua -- https://steemit.com/steemit/@dragosroua/i-didn-t-sign-up-for-this-shutting-down-my-witness-and-seed-nodes
@pharesim -- https://steemit.com/witness-category/@pharesim/rejecting-hf17-and-a-few-thoughts
@chitty -- https://steemit.com/steem/@chitty/to-my-witness-supporters-lets-vote-on-hardfork-17


So here's my own thoughts on each of the changes.

  1. Remove Posting Rate Limit.
    • This is a good change, as it is something easily counteracted by sybils anyway. My point of view from an abuse side, being a part of @steemcleaners, is that we play wack-a-mole with spammers who don't care about this limit anyway. A post limit that makes it complex for a normal user just is not worth it. After this change @steemcleaners will still be playing wack-a-mole with sybils.
  2. The comment depth limit has been increased to 255.
    • This is useful, and it can be up to the interface how to determine how replies are shown.
  3. Comments can now be permanently edited.
    • It says comments, but I hope this applies to all content including posts. This is absolutely necessary, as there is no other blogging platform or website that says "oops! your own content that you wrote and own can't be edited, sorrryyyyy!". Very happy with this.
  4. Comments are now paid out independent of their discussion.
    • This is alright. Attaching the comment payout timer to the original post doesn't make much sense. We should be able to a) comment on an old post, and b) be able to be rewarded for commenting on an old post. Consider an old blog post that suddenly goes viral: We want the author to be able to fix spelling mistakes, and we want to be able to have comment interaction. Comment interaction includes new comments being applicable to be rewarded.
  5. All comments are paid out 7 days after creation and there is no longer a second payout window.
    • I don't quite like the 7 days for the reward. It's simply too long for the average user to understand what is happening: People have short attention spans, and the volatility of reward is incredibly confusing to new users (Post valuation changing over time -- although one remedy to this solution is to only show users received RSHARES, and not the value in dollars. This would be a huge flip in UI and marketing however, as people are currently used to seeing $$$ values.). However, it is also incredibly hard to reconcile the "ability for old posts to go viral and recieve engagement", as I just mentioned, as well as the original post being rewarded. From a consensus point of view, there is no way to be able to continuously vote on content (this would balloon the amount of data to keep track of, forever). We need to think of a better way to, a) reward users promptly, and b) reward users for old posts that either get refined or go viral. Consider the welcome guide to Steemit: further rewards to the writer would be nice, as would the ability to modify and edit as steemit changes, and finally comment on the post like any other blog post. However, it is hard to reconcile a) and b) together, and I unfortunately do not have a solution.
  6. There is now a comment reward fund separate from posts.
    • I don't particularly like this change. This is against the idea of simplicity, this creates a new market of trying to balance rewards (curation, and author) from two different pools with different reward payouts. This is immensely complex for an investor to maximize returns, and will likely cause a teeter-totter of people trying to game rewards from one pool or the other.
  7. All payouts now look at the prior 30 days of payouts to determine the share of the reward rather than the current pending rshares.
    • I understand the technical reason for this change, and I think it will be fine when we reach a steady state.
  8. Reward Balance
    • What is this? I don't understand the reason for this change, nor any communication about this change...
  9. Comment Reward Beneficiaries
    • Nice! I like this a lot, it allows people to reward other people for their own posts, and allows interfaces to claim a small fee for posts using the interface in order to pay their costs. This will be especially great for Busy, and web apps.
  10. Delegated Steem Power
    • This is cool, and will allow blockchain level support for people wishing to let others use their voting power. Trusted curators can be lent the power to vote for content, people who leave for vacation can let their friends vote for them, etc. All this without the requirement of running a bot curation trail (not accessible to the average user!). I hope people who currently run curation trails will consider using this option instead of trails, as the "vote count" is completely insane right now -- a trail could add 100+ "votes", when in reality it was only one person, the curator, who read and enjoyed the content. If people choose this option, we will see a more accurate vote representation. However, if the delegator does not earn a curation reward, we will likely still see curation bots, unfortunately.
    • If you are a follower of my curation trail on streemian.com, and are reading this post -- let me know in the comments what your thoughts are on this: Would you still give me your power to vote if you did not earn rewards? Would you delegate me your power if I payed you a cut of the curation rewards I recieve? Or would you still use streemian as-is?
  11. Accounts can be created with a smaller fee and an initial Steem Power delegation.
    • This is interesting, but I question if this will allow name squatting for people whom have plenty of SP to delegate.
  12. PoW is being removed.
    • It's clear that PoW is broken in its current form. It is also clear that PoW does not actually help secure the network (As it is only one block in a 21 block round). We have never been a "hybrid" PoW/DPoS to be honest, as mining was never a significant amount of the block reward. HOWEVER, one thing people forget about mining is the ability to create new accounts anonymously. We have tools like anonsteem to do this, but this requires trust in an external authority that you pay to recieve an anonymous account. I wonder if we could think of a blockchain level replacement for this, to satisfy me with the removal of PoW.
  13. NTP is disabled by default
    • Sure, more technical improvements. Moving to ntpd is good.

Phew, long read. Still with me? I have more to talk about.


On Witness Politics.

    As a relatively new witness, I am not a whale. I did not get my witness spot until just before the hardfork that cut witness pay to a fraction of the amount. Not being a whale in the witness list means that I do not have the ability to do a "tit for tat" to keep my witness spot -- we regularly see whale witnesses voting for each other in a game theory way (if they vote for me, I vote for them), but this ability does not extend to those of us in the witness list that are not big whales. Due to this, I consider my witness spot more of an elected position, and I have a responsibility to listen to the people who do vote for me as a witness. Although this normally would be a good thing, at the present moment this is actually also concerning to me.

  • If I do support HF17: I may be voted out of the witness list by members of the community who are not supporting it (e.g. abit).
  • If I do not support HF17: I may be voted out of the witness list by the employees of Steemit, Inc. whom vote for me (e.g. ned, val, roadscape).

    Personally, I think we need a better solution for determining the progression of hardforks. Regularly mixing hardware changes (e.g. NTP tweak) with community changes (e.g. Comment reward pool) is not a good thing, and should be separate. We also might need something like community voting -- which could be implemented by witness voting (elected representatives) -- however there represents a conflict of interest if we do this while Steemit employees vote (and I would argue that dan/dantheman perhaps should also choose not to vote if Steemit employees abstain).

    So, I currently do not feel I have a good enough grasp on the situation to take a hard stance at this time, and thus I look forward to continuing to read comments and discussion to help me make up my mind -- a decision that will be "on behalf of my constituents" . If you support me as a witness and have strong opinions about the changes, please comment below!

Sort:  

@anyx damn - that's much pressure on your side not being a whale
I voted you for a witness and you're damn good at it IMHO
I hope they keep you

Thank you for the TMI - at least we're not going to be surprised with that much changes. Are we allowed to say no to one or two of those - the 7day is freaking long - it sucks, you're right at we all have a short attention span . Why change the number of days it's the reward distribution that was the problem not the day or I could be wrong and do correct me.

Thanks for the support! I hope we can say 'no' to some of the things, because I am totally in agreement with you.

Please talk to other witnesses , there seems to be a general consensus that the 7 day period and comment pool should not be included in HF17( need more discussion) and that all other features are fine.
I also agree with this.

Yes, I have been discussing this the past two days with other witnesses. I might have to do a follow-up post. I also do not think the comment pool separation should be included.

From reading your comments on each point, it looks like you do overwhelmingly support the hard fork. Your reservations could easily be addressed on the way to the next HF.

While your position might not be a "hard stance", I gather this is just considering the politics. I hope you choose to implement it, I think we need most of the changes but I would also agree with you that we need more specific hard fork (separating community and technical changes). To do this we need better communication by @sneak and the other devs. They do an admirable amount, and it's not easy, but increased clarity would go a long way.

Thank you for your thoughts on the fork and thank you @anyx for bringing some acknowledgement to the influence of witness politics on platform development. This is something I think has been seriously downplayed by regular users, to the point of potentially preventing a healthy open discussion. There has been a lot of fear to disagree on basic principles and a lot of reactionary fighting on miniscule day-to-day "he said/she did/they should".

(I don't have a solution for it, except "talk more openly about it and don't be afraid to adjust your votes, even if it means less votes/money for you in the short term".)

The fork seems mostly good (my armature opinion and priorities), provided it will be stable and not subject to abuse, which is hard to know and even worse for most people who are not always up to date with the conversations taking place amongst developers.

I hate the sp delegation, all it does is institutionalize the guilds.
Instead of having a guild to be mad about, now I gotta be mad about who knows who.

We need to reevaluate EVERYTHING in the hf, not just what the dev's think will fly with/sneak by the community.
We've already seen that the crowd is pissed, they will be even more pissed when folks start explaining the lack of rewards on sp delegation.

The whales using their sp to mold the platform has been decried by, if nothing else, the price increase when they stopped doing exactly what you are praising.
Death to the guilds and the spreading of whale dna on the trending page, imo.
The community can find it's own 'gems', tyvm.

The whale interests are diametrically opposed to the minnow's, you gotta decide which one you want to support.

I was also disappointed to watch my steem moved to you rather than powering up the seraph bot, but whatever,....

Hm, you have a point about delegation. Not voting seems to have an interesting impact that is becoming more accepted. Might need to rethink it, I agree.

And oops! I thought it was 'reward' kind of thank-you. I see you also powered up another amount to it. I'll send you back the 2 steem.

Nah, keep it, you work hard for me.
I just thought the bot had it coming, I didn't know who's it was.

Haha, too late, just sent it. :)

Oh well, thanks,...I'll powerup another bot when I come across it,...

P.S. Upvoted and RS :))

An excellent HF-17 analysis! I hope you don't go @anyx as your a valued member of this community. I'm one of the top #5 Steemit posters and remember you fondly. We need to find a way to separate the community and hardware updates like you say. Let's hope @ned and Steemit Inc. listen to us. BEST OF LUCK WHATEVER HAPPENS TO YOU! I might try to include some of this content in my video later!

Thanks a lot for the kind words in the video! :)

The @mindhunter has your back @anyx ;) Never be afraid to speak your mind on here! I sympathise with you.

P.S. As one of the top #5 posters on here by # Posts Count, your Intel CPU threads must teem with @mindhunter content! ... and @papa-pepper content too! Ha ha! Steem on!!

The sharing of rewards could be given to authors for all comments on their thread. If it goes viral and gets more comments they could make say 1 percent on each comment.

I've seen this suggestion before, but if implemented this should be an option. For example, suppose I wanted to reward a comment on a post, because the comment is pointing out that the post is malware. I definitely do not want to reward the malware post, just the comment!

Good example but I don't think it's realistic. You would downvote the original post say why on he flag and only upvote comment enough for it to be on the top. I think it needs to be mandatory or optional to the author. He author would almost always say yes to get passive income. But perhaps if the authors reputation is below 0 thhey would forfeit commentrewards.

Some deep thoughts you have their... good read lol I like seeing what you witness think of the changes as they come.

Thanks! Hopefully we can all come to a good consensus. :)

Thank you for posting @anyx.

Having read several of the posts you have listed above with @bhuz's being the latest. One is hoping that your ideas will be given a hearing. Steemians in general are very interested in upcoming changes and are desirous of discussion.

Your well written post is rational and bleujay hopes these simple solutions will be discussed and implemented.

Appreciate the work you do with @steemcleaners. You bring up a very valid point and one hopes the current status regarding posts will not be changed

As for changes....those that are questionable and not easy to reverse should be reviewed.

Very much appreciated this post. Cheers.

Please note....Steemians are for the most part a well informed...well educated people and prefer discussion of changes. This sneek ing up on Steemians wants a change to something more civilised.

Thank you for the feedback!

I don't quite like the 7 days for the reward. It's simply too long for the average user to understand what is happening

I totally agree with this! Based on my limited understanding... I would really like a 24 hour payout to remain in place. Thanks for bringing this up!

Yeah, it's a bit of a concern to me. People like the quick turnaround time (it's almost addicting!). Going from "You get paid soon!" to "You'll get paid this amount, like next week. Probably. It might change. A lot." might be too much of a shock.

I hope the hardfork goes ahead add there is some truly great piece in there which are desperately needed and we agree on. It's a shame there is so much in it that is causing some contention

Yeah, part of the problem is lumping so many changes together in one package.

Definitely. Sometimes it surprises me given the iterative nature of most modern deliveries of which i assumed steemit to be that there are such big releases. Smaller releases with fewer changes that could be more readily agreed upon would benefit all i think. Of course there will always be a percentage of the community that hates change so that might be an issue. But after a while people might accept that particularly in beta rolling changes would be the norm

Of course i am laughing slightly as i am working the entire weekend on my companies latest upgrade project which is a giant waterfall affair and has been six months in the making for it's huge release over the next two days lol

Thanks for the informative post.

Holy JEEZUS this is so much information and I sincerely appreciate it but my brain hurts thinking about all the changes and how it might possibly affect me...or if I'm even going to notice a difference. (This is why I hope you all consider a lot more hardforks with less changes in each!)

And then you asked this:

If you are a follower of my curation trail on streemian.com, and are reading this post -- let me know in the comments what your thoughts are on this: Would you still give me your power to vote if you did not earn rewards? Would you delegate me your power if I payed you a cut of the curation rewards I recieve? Or would you still use streemian as-is?

I have stopped following curation trails because I'm active enough to curate content. Frankly, I haven't looked at the curation rewards in... well... I can't remember.

I'd be foolish if I wasn't looking for every opportunity to earn here but it is not my main motivation. That being said, I should think about who I would entrust my voting to if I was indisposed for any reason.

Personally, you've got my vote and I will remain steadfast because as far as I'm concerned there isn't anything in HF17 that couldn't be adjusted in the HF18 and beyond.

Thanks for the support merej! :) I agree, we can always fix things later. But the hope is to measure twice, cut once!

spoken like a true architect/carpenter ;)

Thanks for sharing. The experiment continue. Some good and others not so sure.
LOL, never know steemcleaners is AKA whack-a-mole
As for point 11, I think it may already be happening.
Cheers.

Thank you for your inputs. We're all following the development of the situation.

I think it's quite stupid to oppose any features at this point. HF is published and the date is set. If somebody wants to make some changes, they need to be implemented in HF18. Let's just get over with this one as soon as possible and not waste any more time.

We have been told by a Steemit employee that such releases are considered only "a proposal" until and unless approved by witness/stakeholder vote. Just because it is tagged as a release doesn't mean it should necessarily be approved.

Yeah, but unless there is a really big problems, it should be accepted. All the minor things can be fixed or adjusted in the next HF.

Changes to the economic rules are never minor things, and are subject to community and stakeholder approval. In this particular case, these are some of the most significant changes ever made, with the possible exception of HF16. The creation of an entirely separate reward pool for comments and increasing the delay for the first payout by about 7x (sometimes a bit less if payouts are extended due to late voting) are especially significant. I agree there are other minor changes and bug fixes included which no one would see any reason to not approve. The exact same situation presented in HF14, and in that case it was decided instead to delay and revise the release link

IMO, if witnesses are blocking a change, supporters of the change should engage in a reasonable good faith effort to convince the witnesses rather than vote them out. Witnesses should be voted out when they are obstinate or forming a power block, rather than because you couldn't convince them to your position. It should be taken for granted that anyone could be wrong about their position.

There is a definite problem with the witness structure. HF17 is a welcome mat to whales to abuse the system. The witness programme needs a thorough overhaul. Conflicts of interest ... not healthy.

Considering that I really do not understand much about crypto-currencies, let alone this harfork mumbo-jumbo....I think I almost grasp the meaning od some of this. Thank you. If anybody has any good explantions can you please post them here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@troyvandeventer/a-fork-is-coming-whats-for-dinner-i-don-t-know. Thanks Upvoted and followed with a resteem.

When will the fork be done? 🍴

Hi - very interesting post and I voted for you.

I'm going to show my ignorance here, but where can I find more info on "hard-forks" please? I'm not clear on what they are.

It seems they change the structure of payouts, I get that, I think.

I'm new to this and wanting to learn all the ins and outs.

Thanks.