Witness Update 2018-09-15 - Hard Fork 20

@quochuy's Witness report

Steem HF20

Steem Hard Fork 20 has been scheduled for September 25th 2018, as announced here: Hardfork Announcement for Witnesses, Exchanges and Users

But what is a Hard Fork?

As we know, on the Steem blockchain, the witnesses are those who are maintaining a server that, 24/7/365.25, await for their turn to receive and sign blocks of transactions (posts, comments, upvotes, transfers...). The signing process is done by a software called steemd, it is currently developed by Steemit Inc and follows a specific protocol (rules) that allow or reject certain operations that happens on the blockchain, rules such as you cannot upvote a post in the last 12 hours of its 7th day or such as the 30 minutes curation window.

When Steemit Inc publishes a new version of steemd there can be bug fixes, new features, new rules etc... When the new changes are so dramatic that they are not backward compatible with the previous version(s) we have a Hard Fork. This is what will be happening with this new version of the software. Steem Witnesses are currently voting for or against it by either choosing to install and run it on their server or not doing so. The irreversible decision to go with HF20 will be made when at least 17 witnesses are running that version. Once this happens, all the other witnesses will have to also update their instance of steemd or that will create a divergence in the blockchain.

I'm getting ready for HF20

I'm still too young of a witness to be able to dig into the source code (in a programming language I haven't touched for decades) of steemd and find bugs etc... so I will be leaving that task to those who know better.

Meanwhile I've spinned up a secondary server and installed steemd v0.20.0 on it. It is currently running and receiving blocks. There are currently 12 out of 20 top witnesses who have voted for HF20 and I also believe this version will bring some good to the platform so I will let it run until tomorrow evening to make sure all is going smoothly, I will then making it my primary witness server.

Screen Shot 2018-09-15 at 10.29.37 pm.JPG

Vote for me?

My current rank is 101 but because the platform still counts witnesses who have stopped witnessing for the blockchain, I'm considered as rank 122 and won't appear in the list of the Steemit Witnesses page until that number reaches 100. So if you would like to vote for me you will need to scroll down to the bottom of the Steemit Witnesses page, type my name quochuy in the text field and click on the VOTE button.

Screen Shot 2018-09-15 at 10.46.10 pm.JPG

Alternatively, you can use the following SteemConnect link:
https://steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=quochuy&approve=1

More info about hard forks

Here are some videos that might help you understand a bit more.

What is a Hard Fork, explanation using Bitcoin as an example:

Steem HF20 on Youtube:

Summary of some of my other contributions

Project	Description	Link
Steemed Phish	Chrome browser extension to make external links more visible and alert you on Phishing/Scamming links	Steemed Phish
Dtube Community Support	This project by @evildido allows users to run their own IPFS node and pin videos in order to cache them for longer. Dtube has the tendency of deleting non-popular video after few days only. I helped Dockerizing the project for an easier deployment on almost any platform. I've also contributed by running two nodes, one in Australia and one in Canada to cache #teamaustralia and #teamnz videos.	Dockerizing Dtube Community Support
DiscoSteem Bot	This is a Discord/Steem bot project by @planetenamek. When I started Steemulant Bot for the Vietnamese community, I didn't know the existence of DiscoSteem Bot and wanted something written in NodeJS. I've ended up continuing my own project as it contains code and logic for personal use and for the Vietnamese community. But I've decided to share some useful features that can benefit the users of DiscoSteem Bot and will continue to add more functionalities as I go.	Dockerizing DiscoSteem Bot
A Dollar A Day	This is a project run by @pennsif and will donate 15 SBD every day to a charity	"A dollar a day" fundraiser - Karaoke Singing: Le chanteur malheureux
Team Vietnam	I started a new Vietnamese community on Discord and developed @teamvn, a community bot to help grow the Vietnamese community and help them create higher quality content.
POCKET-JS	This is my Javascript (NodeJS) port of the POCKET confirmer by @biophil. POCKET is an experimental crypto token on top of STEEM.	POCKET-JS Confirmer
Skippy Bot	I've written this Discord bot for @teamaustralia, it has three main features: a level bot (like Tatsumaki but with Australian animal images), a chatter bot and a footer banner generator for both @teamaustralia, @teamnz and @steemph	Witness Update 2018-07-30 - Team Australia's Skippy Bot

Credits

The image at the top has been generated with the Canva app using my own photo.