What is excellent about HF20?

1. We have a date! After over a year of waiting we finally have a scheduled release date. Fantastic!

2. The date has been announced with ample lead time for everyone to prepare. Not only that but the actual code release has been scheduled for a full month before the fork. I feel strongly that in a blockchain ecosystem with many users there should be a very healthy amount of lead time for updates. This hasn't always been done in the past but it is being done this time. Wonderful!

3. The new resource credit (RC) system is revolutionary, cutting edge work that is leading the entire blockchain industry! As noted in the @steemitblog post, there are only a few blockchains which function without transaction fees. Doing so while protecting against abusive spam or low value bloat is a difficult unsolved problem and Steem is leading the way here. We can't really know if this solution will fully solve the problem until it has been battle tested, but the direction is very promising and has a lot of built-in flexibility to incrementally improve if needed. You can read more about the RC system in previous @steemitblog posts here and here. Brilliant!

4. Discounted account creation. I'm a little less excited about this as I don't really think paying a few dollars to create a permanent account on a blockchain is a big problem (quality customer acquisition usually costs a lot more than that). However, I know various apps are excited about it so I hope it works out for them and doesn't just become another vehicle for abusive account farming. Verdict: wait and see.

5. Many small improvements, tweaks and fixes. Did I mention that we have a release date? After over a year of collecting code improvements, the list is impressive even if none is revolutionary on its own, and these will finally be going into deployment. Also promising is that fact that a number of these are community contributions, showing that the development is becoming more decentralized. Excellent work by both the Steemit and contributing community developers who made all of these updates possible!

What do you think is excellent (or perhaps not quite excellent) about HF20?

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