HF21 finished and #NewSteem is here!

I scheduled this post 5 minutes after the time when the hardfork was slated to happen, at 11am EDT, which was 6pm my time.

If you see this post, it means probably nothing terribly wrong went with the hardfork.

There may be glitches, some immediately after the hard fork, others we might see a while after, but when I'm writing this it's still HF20, so I don't really know what happened.

What I want to do is a little review of the changes - big and small - from hardfork number 21:

There are three category of changes included in the HF21:

1. Steem.DAO (a.k.a. Steem Proposal System)
2. Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP)
3. Two other small changes but with significant impact

1. Steem.DAO (a.k.a. Steem Proposal System)

Steem Proposal System (SPS) diverts 10% of the total inflation (along with donations) to fund the projects deemed worthy by the community.

This is the part of HF21 which is generally not contested and thought as a great and needed solution to self-sustain development, possibly marketing too or other important projects.

Curiously, Steemit doesn't have an interface for SPS yet, although I remember Blocktrades built a rudimentary one for testing for them.

But SteemPeak does. You can see projects being proposed, vote for them or propose your own project (it costs 10 SBD to do that, with no guarantee of funding). Go here and check them out:
https://steempeak.com/proposals

I'm sure you will find a FAQ for Steem Proposal System helpful, so thank @jarvie for putting one together.

And one last thing. Being a new system, some may try to take advantage of it and propose silly projects to get funded and take advantage of people's confusion before they vote on the right projects. @gtg proposes a solution for that, and it's a good idea to vote for his project as soon as you can, because all it does is to return the funds to SPS when it's voted above a project that isn't worth it. Read his post, because he explains it in very simple terms:
https://steempeak.com/steemdao/@gtg/steemdao

2. Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP)

About EIP has been said a lot. And it was often considered a controversial addition to HF21.

It consists of three parts:

• 2.1. Change to the reward curve
• 2.2. Change to the author:curators reward split
• 2.3. New downvote pool

2.1. Change to the reward curve

In HF20 the reward curve was linear, meaning that 1 SP upvote was worth the same regardless of the payout of the post when it was cast.

In HF21, the reward curve changes to convergent linear. The curve starts out superlinear and slowly converges to linear. When it converges to linear, the two reward curves are relatively identical in HF20 and HF21, but before that HF21 rewards will suffer a certain drop, depending on many factors, not only on the curve itself.

I've seen two numbers for the value of the payout when the curve converges to linear: at 16 STEEM or at 20 STEEM. Not sure which one is 100% accurate. But certainly below a 16 STEEM payout there is a certain rewards drop due to the superlinear curve.

There is a good effect of the new convergent linear reward curve too! It entices people to aggregate SP in a main account (and to buy more SP), because having more SP matters more than before.

2.2. Change to the author:curators reward split

I think since the beginning of Steem it was a 75:25 reward split between authors and curators, unlike the reward curve, which has previously been different.

The equal split between authors and curators has been asked for a long time, and it's finally implemented in the NewSteem.

I'm not sure if that's good or bad, it has both positive and negative effects, so we will have to see, because the end results mainly depend on how our behavior changes because of it.

2.3. New downvote pool

Having 2.5 free downvotes per day can matter... if you use them. And that can be thought both individually and collectively (or as a service).

Maybe we had too many carrots and not enough sticks on Steem, and maybe this is the solution to fix this unbalance. We will see. People have to decide to use or delegate this new power for "good", but if it concentrates in the hands of those who abuse the system, then it will be even worse than now.

3. Two other small changes but with significant impact

3.1. Full Curation Delay Reduced from 15min to 5min

In HF20 you would receive full curation if you voted after at least 15 min from the time of publishing. A vote before the 15 min mark would have reduced your curation reward progressively, all the way to almost 0 if you voted immediately after publishing.

In HF21, this delay until you receive full curation is reduced from 15 minutes to 5 minutes. That means that you have to adjust your automated votes and that you can vote without restrictions any post after 5 minutes, without worrying that your curation reward will be diminished.

3.2. Increased number of JSON entries per block

Up until now there was a restriction of 1 JSON entry per block, justified by the need to prevent abuse and clutter of the blockchain.

In practice it turned out 1 JSON per block was too little for some projects like our Steem-based games. Thus, with this hardfork the decision has been made to increase that value to 5, which will make our Steem-based games and other projects which which JSON intensively run smoother.

So, the #NewSteem is here (for you, not yet for me)! Don't expect any sudden extraordinary benefits, but overall, and if we decide to give a hand to steer it in the right direction, this will be better than the OldSteem.

From the HF20 side, I'll leap forward and catch up with you on the NewSteem! See ya'!