My thoughts on hardfork v17

Hi everyone, 

As the hardfork is rapidly approaching I would like to share my thoughts on each of the items mentioned. Overall I think the changes will be good, but I don't like the comment reward fixed split option. I will be upgrading my witness to be ready, but I would prefer an option which did not include the comment reward fixed split. Thank you for your time. 

Remove Posting Rate Limit.
Posting rewards are no longer penalized for posting more than 4 times in 24 hours. Originally this was implemented to reduce the impact of bots posting junk content. Ultimately it ended up hurting legitimate authors.

Approve- I think overall this will have a positive impact by simplifying things for users and any abuse would be more noticeable now that we have a more active community. 

The comment depth limit has been increased to 255. 
The limitation was created to make UI design easier. Many changes we are making are to do right by the blockchain and have the UI adapt. Each UI can and should choose how deep of comments they want to display and can actively reject comments that are deeper than the limit they wish to display. The soft limit is 255 with a hard limit of 64k. 64k was chosen as a limit because the depth is stored on each comment object. This allows us to use a 16 bit field and 64k should be more than enough depth for anybody. (Reddit has a limit of 10,000)

Approve- The less intrusions from system rules to the user, the better. 

Comments can now be permanently edited.
We are adapting a new model of imposing as few restrictions in consensus code as possible and having witness actively reject transaction for both rate limiting and security. There is a soft freeze of 7 days that will be lifted with a non-consensus operation. This custom operation still needs to implemented, but will be included in 0.17.1. The operation will be a plugin op in the witness plugin that will inform a witness to accept edits for the next T minutes.

Approve

Comments are now paid out independent of their discussion.
Paying out discussions as a whole was a design decision to make displaying discussions by total_children_rshares2 easier. It also made sense to do this with multiple payout windows. This tight coupling ultimately has proven unnecessary. Removing restrictions on depth and editing makes this idea antiquated.

Approve

All comments are paid out 7 days after creation and there is no longer a second payout window.
99% of votes are cast in the first 7 days after creation. This elimates the need for a second payout to accumulate value to a post and simplifies logic significantly.

Neutral- I think the main concern associated with this is the possibility of long term value posts missing out and receiving smaller payouts if they are not voted for right away. While I agree with the concern, there are still ways for posts to receive payouts as long as comments are treated separately(can be made on posts of any age and payouts timelines are not related to the original post). To continue receiving payouts, the author could comment below their post and modify the original to direct people to vote for the comment. This would obviously complicate things and for it to be usable, most aspects would have to be hidden from the users. The question then would be whether the added complexity is worth the gains from simplifying the blockchain logic. Since I don't have a good enough understanding of the tradeoffs in these two scenarios I am holding off from making a decision.

There is now a comment reward fund separate from posts.
We want discussion to be incentivized. Currently, comments are only claiming 2% of the content rewards and there are more comments than posts. Comments will receive 38% of the content reward fund. This change should incentivize commenting, engaging in, and curating discussions.

Reject- The comment rewards do seem a little low, however I don't like the idea of forcing a specific split. While I understand that this number could be adjusted, I think finding a correct setting may be difficult in the long run. In addition, other changes to the system associated with voting(voting curve flattening, abit's no whale voting experiment) may have a positive impact on the comment rewards situation. If the lack of comment rewards was simply another symptom of concentration of voting power then it would seem wise to see if comment rewards change as a result of these other experiments. 

All payouts now look at the prior 30 days of payouts to determine the share of the reward rather than the current pending rshares.
The reason for this change is twofold. 1. Looking at a 30 day decaying window reduces variance in payout due to small changes in vote densities. 2. On votes we are currently updating the comment the vote is on, every comment in the tree up to the root, and the global property object. With this algorithm we only need to update the comment, significantly reducing the amount of time spent processing votes. With this change, payouts will initially dip and then ramp up over the next 30 days until the reward fun reaches a steady state.
Reward Balance
Rewards will now go into a separate reward balance that must be claimed before they can be used.

Approve- I think this is reasonable as long as it is easily accessible in the gui.

Comment Reward Beneficiaries
All content can now specify beneficiaries to receive a part of their author rewards. The beneficiaries are specified in the extension field of the comment_options_operation and is a sorted vector (by account name) of account name, weight pairs. The beneficiaries can only be specified once and must be specified before any votes are cast on the comment. Most apps are already adding a comment_options_operation in the transaction that creates the comment, so this should not be much of a challenge to add to existing apps

Approve- Probably one of the most exciting aspects of this hardfork, which will hopefully open up new business opportunites for developers building on steem.

Delegated Steem Power
Steem Power can now be delegated to other accounts. This transfers content voting rights and bandwidth allocation but not witness voting rights. Delegations come in to effect immediately, both when increasing and decreasing a delegation. However, Steem Power being returned by decreasing or removing a delegation has a one week delay in limbo before it is returned to the owner. This is to prevent a satoshi of Steem Power from being able to vote on the same content twice.
Accounts cannot power down Steem Power that is being delegated, nor can they delegate Steem Power that is being powered down.

Approve- This seems like an interesting change which could provide an additional opportunity for steem holders, besides voting with it themselves. 

Accounts can be created with a smaller fee and an initial Steem Power delegation.
Instead of paying the entire account creation fee with Steem, creators can now pay a smaller fee (30x less) and delegate some Steem Power for 30 days. The exact amount is 5 * min_fee + STEEM_POWER == 150 * min_fee. You can pay any combination of STEEM and Steem Power along that curve (so long as the minimum fee is paid).The witness voted STEEM fee is now the minimum required STEEM fee for delegation. Witnesses should reduce their fee by 30x when the hardfork goes live to preserve the same required fee for an all STEEM account creation.

Approve

PoW is being removed.
PoW has been broken for a long time. Very few people pay attention to it. It is dominated by the same few people and is providing very little value to Steem. Instead of investing even more time fixing it, we have decided to remove it entirely.

Approve- I have no problem with this. As someone who has used this feature in the past, it actually seems more like a distraction from the real product than anything else. Also having the extra funds to support an additional full time witness seems like a better use of the blockchains funds.  

NTP is disabled by default
There is an option, enable-ntp that can be set to true in the config file to enable ntp in steemd. All node operators should begin using ntpd as we will be removing ntp from steemd in a future release.

Approve

Sort:  

Allowing sp delegation institutionalizes the guilds.
Banding together for power is playing out irl, we don't need it here.
Use @steemvoter if you need to farm out your curation?
Don't let the whales manipulate the front page any more than they already do, huh?
They may not like the content that the community likes,...

Thank you for posting @delegate.lafona.

Appreciate hearing from the witnesses.......thank you for this report and the work you do for Steemit.

All the best. Cheers.

Thanks! I see you're disapproving of the comment reward pool and I was wondering if you have a definite stance on whether you'll update or not?

I am planning on updating my backup node to allow for a fast switch if i need it but I will leave the primary witness node on 16.1 in support of not updating until a better consensus is reached.

Great! I'm wondering how will turn out.

Hi there.. would you check out your witness votes and maybe remove some inactive ones.. I hope you consider to vote for me.. I am a new witness and your vote can change my life

Thanks for the information @delegate.lafona
very help me
follow me @hattaarshavin

hello
This is awesome !
Please check my last post and share your opinion
@muhammadbadawi

Greetings! I can see you haven't been active much on Steemit recently and noticed that some of your witness votes currently point to inactive witnesses (roadscape, steempty and witness.svk). I just launched a witness campaign for Steemit and have a pretty high capacity server, plus a lot of professional experience with software/hardware (and banks of all things!) - I'd really appreciate if you would consider switching an inactive witness to a vote for me to give me a chance to serve the community as best I can.
My witness application is here. Cheers!

Hi, I'm following you, and I gave you my vote for a witness. I hope to have your vote in my publications

thanks ....
good and i like your post.....
new information from me....
regards @azyref

Thank you for sharing. By reading it. It gives me some understanding about the rules here

Congratulations @delegate.lafona! You have received a personal award!

2 Years on Steemit
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i want to bring witness to my d 0 w/(h) e (a)d https://steemit.com/g0fig/@xubrnt/ned-steemit

i voted for you and you might be also vote for me.

Hello!

I am a community manager at Snax. We are trying to make public blockchain based on EOS node. Snax chain will provide transactions over social networks, token supply based on user social influence.

Snax as well as Steemit rewards its users for the content created, but Snax works as overlay solution over existing social networks (e.g. Twitter)

We have no ICO. We already have a testnet, mainnet will be launched this month, and we currently looking for great candidates for Block Producers like yourself. You can find out more about us at our website snax.one

If our project is interesting for you, please let me know by emailing me at [email protected]

Looking forward to hearing from you, and keep rocking this world!

Thank you for your vote, although it's expired.

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