The Steemit hard fork has been the talk of the town lately. For those who don't know, the Steemit hardfork 19, is releasing on June 20th, 2017, at 15:00:00 UTC (11:00:00 EDT), and will have a few changes, mostly concerning the upvoting process.
The codename is "Equality" and it's designed to make everyone's influence directly proportional to their stake (instead of the current system in which influence is exponentially related). So right now, whenever you upvote something, you use 0.5% of your remaining voting power (which regenerates fully after 5 days, 20% a day). This means that you would need to vote 40 times with full power to fully use your votes and have it regenerate fully the next day. With the new change, your voting power will increase 4x (to 2%), so at full voting power, you could only vote 10 times before using it all up for that day. For example, say your upvote is worth $0.25, starting tomorrow, your upvote will now be worth $1.00, so you're essentially giving people more money whenever you vote.
So what does this mean? Well for starters, it could mean that people are more stingy with their votes since they have less of them to use at full power, so only the best content will get upvoted. Another aspect is people could change their percentage of voting power they use (using the power slider that becomes available at approximately 480 Steem Power) so they can vote more times while giving less money.
Another change of this hardfork that people aren't talking about is the deleting of historical posts. So right now, if a post is older than 7 days, you can delete it. But starting tomorrow, if a post is older than 7 days, you can no longer delete it. This means that people need to be consciencious about what they post since it will now be on Steemit to stay.
So that's the hardfork 19 in a nutshell! I'm interested to see how things change with the upvoting process, but I'm sure people will adjust. Until next time, stay safe, and happy investing!
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