What’s New in The Steem Blockchain Velocity Update [Hard Fork 20]
Resource Credits and Subsidized Account Creation.
On 25th September, the Steem blockchain was upgraded for the 20th time. These upgrades are big deal in the blockchain ecosystem. They consist of a change in algorithms, rules, and new features.
What changed after this update and how does this affect Steem based apps and new users is a little bit tricky to understand. In this blog, I’ll try to cover the changes in the Steem blockchain that matters to the users of Steem based platforms.
If you are new to the Steem blockchain, here is a short note to get you up to the speed —
Steem is an open-source blockchain to build incentivized content publishing platforms. In other words, by using Steem we can build apps where people can earn (cryptocurrency rewards) for the likes/upvotes they receive on the content they post. The most popular platforms built on Steem blockchain are Steemit and Dtube. One Million+ accounts and 150K active users make it the only widely adopted and scalable blockchain based platform on the Internet.
What is a Hard Fork?
Hard fork is a software update.
In case of blockchain, after a hard fork the chain of blocks split into two. The upgraded nodes (servers which except the latest updates) create blocks according to the new rules. If all the nodes (decentralised servers running the blockchain software) choose to switch to a new update, they create new blocks as per the new rules. The nodes running an older version will create separate blocks according to the old rules (split).
In case of Steem blockchain, the witnesses (nodes) were required to re-index the older blocks (so the existing users will have excess to their older posts) for backward-compatibility.
It is a software update, the only difference is that the nodes can choose if they want to except the new changes or not. If they do, majority of the nodes need to vote in favour of the upgrade. That gives a bird eye view of blockchain hard forks.
Steem Velocity Update — Hard Fork 20
This update was named Velocity, prominently it makes the Steem scalable and the most advanced freemium blockchain in the world.
Here is a partial list of what’s new in the latest update —
Resource Credits
The Old Way — Bandwidth Algorithm
Every action: post, comment, upvote etc. on the Steem blockchain is a transaction. Every transaction takes up some physical resources to complete.
In the earlier version it was assumed that all the cost incurred in physical resources for transactions are correlated to one resource type: Transaction size. Which means that the true cost of a transaction was not calculated precisely.
In that system, the less active users were compensating for the more active users. Under the old bandwidth model, a follow was underpriced because its computational cost to the blockchain is born over time, whereas a transfer is dramatically overpriced since it requires a lot of resources at the time of the transfer, but virtually none over time. Yet, under the bandwidth model, token transfers are 24 times more expensive than a follow. The RC system fixes this by accounting for a wider variety of consumed resources thereby creating more accurate internal pricing.
The New Way — Resource Credits
The resource allocation system efficiently allocates blockchain resources and accurately measures the true cost of running the Steem blockchain.
It introduced a new unit called Resource Credits (RCs). Every transaction costs a calculated amount of RCs. The system now assumes that all the physical resources are correlated to three factors: blockchain size, state size, and computational load.
Your RCs depend on the Steem Power your account holds. Depending on your Steem power you get a limited number of comments, upvotes, and transactions to perform on the blockchain. If you exhaust your RCs, they will recharge linearly in 5 days.
You can check your RCs on Steemd.com —
Votes and transfers require relatively few RCs, while comments consume far more RCs. This is based entirely on the amount of computational resources these activities consume.
Resource credit is the key change in this update. For detailed technical overview, please refer to this blog post by Steemit.
Subsidised Account Creation
The account creation on Steem costs less with this new update. The blockchain subsidised account creation reduces the cost from earlier 7 Steem to now 6.1 Steem. Now developers got new method to create new accounts using RCs.
Manabar
The way voting power is now tracked is via a “manabar”.
Your max mana depends on your Steem Power, delegations, and active power down. Mana regenerates proportional to your max mana and is updated whenever there is a change to your max mana or a vote takes place.
These are changes in HF20 that mostly affect the Steem users. Apart from this, there is a long list of all the changes made that you may read in this blog post.
1Ramp is a social media powered by Steem blockchain. On 1Ramp, creators can join communities of their interest, share their work, and earn rewards.
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