Fork. The answer was fork. 🤣 What's up my humans. We have a hardfork coming, and it looks to be a beautiful thing! After the chat yesterday with host @crimsonclad and top witnesses like @blocktrades and @themarkymark breaking it down for us, I thought I might give you the major takeaways I had from it all. I've been paying attention to some coders here and there, chiming in with some opinions I know we all share, and even been keen to make myself familiar with the things proposed on gitlab.

I feel there are three major things that will affect most all of us on various levels. One of those changes, has already been implemented by the consensus (meaning the top 20 witnesses that carry the weight for changes to occur here) and I have seen some of its benefits. So, let's start there.

HBD INTEREST

I personally have had interest set on my witness since I figured out what it was, which was about 6 months after becoming one. That puts it at three years running. I'm not sure about the hesitation with so many others, but I'm glad they're finally starting to see what I already did. It currently rests at 3% on all HBD holdings in your wallet. The change coming for HF25 will be that it will only apply to your savings. Better to keep our assets here, right?

There is also talk of a significant increase in the actual percentage. Once the hardfork is live, I will be adjusting both my own and @thealliance's witness to reflect a 5% minimum APR. I am under the impression (and hope) that it attracts more investors and maybe even some content creators to the Hive blockchain. Definitely an improvement in my opinion.

GOVERNANCE EXPIRATION

This has been talked about since I got to this dPoS chain. The main gripe was about the fact that witness voting was, once set, in place for the life of an account until removed. The argument presented to adjust the governance to an expiring vote, was that there are no democratic offices that are elected for life. Since this is a decentralized system, it would only make sense that no one retains anyone's vote for life.

With the new changes, all governance voting has a one year shelf-life. This concerns any proposals one may have their vote on, any witnesses you may be voting on and also, people proxied to anyone else and trusting them with their votes. Each will have to be revisited and a timer will be in place (I believe) on hive.blog (probably in the wallet) and PeakD. Whenever you participate in some form of governance, your 'clock' will be reset. Major win as this has been an issue since the dawn of time.

CURATION

Currently, people have to fight tooth and nail to get that prized 'first come, first serve' curation reward in the first 5 minutes of a post being released. Unless you are on an autovoting trail or constantly refreshing your feed for new content, it is somewhat rare you'll actually get the most out of a manual curation effort. Even being on a trail, you are still behind the leader.

The great new adoption for curation is to have it be an equal curation split for everyone within the first 24 hours of a post. It will still be stake-weighted for each individual voter of course, but the maximization is there. This will breathe new life into trails and people like me (who argued for a 24 hour window vs the initial 2 hour one that was proposed) that are not on Hive all day but do make an effort to support content I feel is worth it.

So what do you think? Are these changes good? Does it excite you? Feel free to ask any questions or leave some comments below. You know that I do me, so REMEMBER TO BE YOU! I always am, even when my daughter catches more fish than me.