Steem 0.8.0 Released
In this release we are pleased to announce many enhancements to the protocol. Witnesses can review the code and update to the latest master branch by June 30th at 15:00:00 GMT. If the majority of the witnesses upgrade by that date the hard fork will go into effect.
The code is available in github here:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases/tag/v0.8.0
New Features
We have added some new features to the protocol that are designed to give people greater control over their funds.
Vesting Withdraw Destinations
This is a new operation that gives users the ability to direct where the proceeds from the automatic vesting withdraws are deposited. You can now specify another account to receive the payout. This new operation also gives you the option to automatically re-vest your funds in the new account. With this feature enabled it is now trivial to automatically merge your accounts over time.
Post / Comment Options
There have been many cases where people would like the option of posting without receiving a payout. There is a new operation that allows you to configure the following aspects of a post:
the maximum payout
the percent of Steem Dollars to auto-convert to Steem Power
whether or not replies are allowed
whether or not up votes are allowed (down votes are always possible)
whether or not curation rewards are paid on a post
These options gives people to opt-out of the monetary aspects of Steem and focus on just pure content. Changes to curation rewards and voting preferences are only possible prior to any votes being cast.
All options are one-way. Once you specify it you cannot change it back. This gives everyone who chooses to engage with your post a heads-up as to the rules.
Authors who decline to enable curation rewards on their post do not profit from that decision. The lack of curation rewards is likely to result is less total votes and being ignored by bots.
Vote Changes
We added some extra filtering to reject changes to your vote if the new vote is the same as the old vote. This helps protect people from inadvertently resetting their curation rewards.
We also allow people to change their vote in a way that would increase payout up to 60 seconds before payout. This gives police-bots time to down vote clear abusers, but otherwise gives people a more predictable experience.
Rate Limit Changes
Rate limiting on posting posting comments and top-posts has been updated. Currently you are only able to submit a new post or comment once per minute. Some users found they would hit this limit. After the hard-fork there will be different limits for posts and comments. Posts will be limited to one very 5 minutes (per account), and comments will be limited to one very 20 seconds.
Curation Reward Adjustments
We have made a few small tweaks to the posting / curation rewards that will apply to all existing payouts.
Voting Power regenerates at a fixed rate over 5 days.
Posting Reward curve is now R2 + 2RS rather than R2 and a relatively small value of S was chosen.
Curation Rewards are not biased toward large account holders.
Reverse Auction Curation Rewards
Starting *TODAY all curation rewards earned by voting in the first 30 minutes after a post is made will be shared with the author. If you vote immediately after a post is made, then 99.94% of the curation reward will go to the author. If you vote after 15 minutes, then 50% will go to the author. Any votes made 30 minutes or later 100% will go to the curator. This only applies to the curation rewards. The author still gets at least 50% of the total rewards.
The reverse auction system creates a “price” for curators and makes bot development more complex and beneficial. Under the current system there is a race to be first which results in a random ordering of votes from bots on a post. The order dramatically impacts the profitability of the bot and reduces the ability of Steem to extract useful information from bots. Currently only 1 bit of information per vote.
Under the new system bots must balance speed vs payout without waiting too long. Which ever bot is willing to share the most with the author for the privilege of going first wins. To maximize their reward bots want to wait the longest time possible without letting other bots go first.
The goal isn’t to eliminate bots, that is impossible. The goal is to make sure that bots provide us as much useful information as possible and to encourage development of sophisticated voting strategies. Steem can now extract 10 times the information from the same bot vote.
If something is trivial to curate then votes pile in and early and the author benefits. If it is difficult to curate then curators make the maximum reward due to the time it takes to identify and discover the content.
Discussion Rewards
Starting July 4th, 25% of the total payouts allocated to a top-level post will be split among all comments proportional to the votes the comments receive. All comments will be paid out at the same time as the parent post and all votes on replies count toward extending the parent posts’ payout time.
This change is made to facilitate more efficient monitoring of payouts. Rather than reviewing payouts for random comments at random times, people see payouts grouped together under a single discussion.
By rewarding discussion we are encourage reviews and critiques of high payout posts.
Parent Post Rewards
Comments no longer share their payouts with the parent comment. We reversed the direction of flow, top level posts now share rewards with comments.
Fix Divide by Zero Error
The existing code has a bug that will cause a divide by zero error on July 4th for anyone who does not upgrade to new code. This means that not upgrading by July 4th is not an option.
No Curation Rewards after First Payout
After the first payout on a post is made it is possible for additional payouts to be made if more votes come in later. These “late votes” will no longer qualify for curation rewards.
All of these changes seem good to me except this:
This will lead to low-quality commenting I believe. I said it before but comments and discussion is much more valuable when it's natural rather than incentivized.
At least when someone comments it should take a minimum vote from the commenter de-facto (auto-vote)
like it will happen for the post authors after all (auto-voting) and for the same reasons...
maybe reduce the voting power to 1% default for comments but let it be editable to 5% max....
or even better introduce a 5 "star" voting system option... (only for advanced users?)
I agree. I think comments should be incentivized separately from posts, instead of being some percentage of the parent post. Does anybody know why we cannot have two separate funds: one for posts and another one for comments, as @liondani proposed here?
I think we are about to make a similar mistake as was commonplace in BitShares: ideas not properly explained. Dan is brillant with his concepts but not patient enough to explain every little detail. As a result, I am not able to make an informed decision.
A workaround for the author is to write a reply and ask for up-votes to that reply.
That's just silly though. Plus 25% is a gigantic cut for comments. I don't like it at all.
Why is No Curation Rewards after First Payout a good thing? Late votes still have value even if not as much as early votes. Is there a limit to resources?
How long after posting is the payout? a day, week, month?
If there are no rewards for keeping good content up, this will turn into a viral twitter repost wasteland.
It depends on the voters. Every time a new vote is added to a post or one of its comment, the payout time is re-calculated to no later than 24 hours after last vote. The more Steem power the new vote come with, the longer the delay. Usually I'll expect the first payout to be in a few days, and more rounds of payouts every a few days (or no more payout if no move new vote).
Thanks for the info. Is this going to be officially posted anywhere?
I think it should be put into the white paper, if have not already done.
In general I agree with these changes, I also think that the new curation reward scheme will make it more fun to vote, people will have to decide when to vote... 15 minutes, 19.. whoever is willing to "lose" the most will go first.. this is the kind of feature that gets people hooked, brilliant!
Our goal was to make voting fair for those who don't pay attention to the rules and just vote in the moment. At the same time we wanted to make voting a game for bot operators with advanced AI. The complex interactions between normal voters providing organic votes and vote speculators placing strategic votes should give something for everyone.
I doubt this will be a problem in the future though. no one but us nerds care about 9% or 10% payout. I really hope it comes to the point where the regular user does not care about all this stuff
There is a lot of nerds in the world!
According to the code, it's actually 10 seconds.
And a side note: an author need to wait for 5 minutes to be able to post a top-level post after posted a new post OR commented on a post, but did NOT need to wait after edited a post, also no need to wait to be able to edit a post.
I'm a little nervous about this statement and I'm not sure if I need to take action. Please clarify if I need to do something or not: "The existing code has a bug that will cause a divide by zero error on July 4th for anyone who does not upgrade to new code. This means that not upgrading by July 4th is not an option"
This message only applies to witnesses/miners who run the blockchain-level code. Normal users of the steemit web site don't have to worry about this.
According to the code, it is actually 20%.
I wonder if whale bots will start playing games like 1% downvoting their spammy child comment and then 100% upvoting their grandchild comment in an attempt to keep a low profile while capturing a large share of the discussion rewards for threads that don't have too many highly upvoted comments.
That's a good point and/or strategy. Far easier than competing on the curation reward of top-level posts.
I think once the content has matured to within a certain percentage of the worlds holdings, equal power in the blockchain will be distributed as is. I think this is brilliant
Not only the profitability of bots, also low-SP users! (i.e. most users). By the time those 30minutes are over, our weight will be 0 = no payout... Explain to me how low-SP users are not getting screwed here?!
EDIT: at first sight the weight isn't going to 0 after 30min, great! It might be an improvement after all :)
That's said, low-SP users should pay more attention to write something and/or vote organically.
Most low-SP users will never 'organically' catch up with the whales, so they will remain relatively weak.
The only way for them to successfully participate in voting will be to pay hard cash for more SP. Probably this is supposed to create demand for STEEM. Not with me though, at most I'll mine SP but that's it.
I refuse to pay for power others gained by just mining early :)
You can always create content. There's no barrier to entry or accumulation of SP that way ;))
I'm still slightly amazed by the idea of pitting robots against humans more fairly. This is a great step forward for a fair system.
me too. It's so futuristic and bizarre.
Will the windows binaries for mining be posted anywhere? can those be used before the 30th?
Paging @bitcube and @arhag, the kind people who brought us windows mining <3
What is the difference between a "top-level" post and just some random post?
I think non-top-level means comment