Greetings to all my esteemed followers in Steemit, today I will share an article about the Hardfork Number 20 of Steemit known as Velocity scheduled for next September 25, I have taken some time in my daily routine to inform the community about the most important changes that are coming to our beloved social network.

It is important for all Steemians to know about these changes and prepare for them, as well as to analyze the possible implications they will have on our activities at Stemit, as authors and curators.

The Hardfork number 20 of Steemit is at the doors, September 25 is the date scheduled for this update, and however, most users of Steemit do not know the most important changes that will involve due to this situation. I decided to write this article to inform about what is coming up in Steemit.

First of all I will mention that the Hardfork is an update of the protocol that in the case of Steemit to be operational must be approved by 17 of the 21 witnesses that are active at the time of Hardfork, this update will bring numerous changes to Steemit highlighting in particular The following points:

1) Replacement of the Bandwith System by Resource Credits

We all know the bandwith system which is responsible for limiting spam within the platform by setting a limit to the transactions that a user can make based on their Steem Power; this system has the peculiarity that the amount of bandwith of each user experience large variations in short time intervals.

In the Hardfork 20 a new mechanism is proposed that will replace the bandwith. The new Resource Credits (RC) system will be based on three different types of RC:

1. Blockchain Size (Size of block chain)

2. State Size (State Size)

3. Computational Load (Computational Load)

The system will distribute to each user an amount of RC proportional to his Steem Power, after that he will calculate the cost of each transaction in RC according to the demand and capacity of the system. Like the Bandwith system, the spent Resource Credits will recharge over time.

In summary it is a better system to distribute the resources of the blockchain, we will have to wait to see it work to understand its implications.

2) Creation of discounted accounts, Velocity's main course

Dear Steemit followers this point seems to be the main motivation behind the HF20 Velocity, currently the creation of accounts is basically done in two ways:

By paying Steem: In this case the user who creates must pay approximately 3 Steem (30 times the account creation rate account_creation_fee currently in 0.1 Steem) which are transferred to the account created as Steem Power.

By delegation of Steem Power: In this mode the user who creates must transfer 0.1 Steem to the new account (which are transferred to the account created as Steem Power) and delegate to that account approximately 14.75 Steem Power.

It is important to note that when a new user registers on the Steemit.com page his account is created by @steem through the second mechanism, that is, transfer 0.1 Steem and delegate approximately 14.75 Steem Power.

This account creation mechanism has limited Steemit's growth capacity due to the long queues generated by new users who do not receive the email (remember that the amount of SP that the @steem account can delegate is limited), additionally has encouraged the appearance of numerous bots that are created in a massive way and have an initial delegation of almost 15 SP with which they can obtain small healing rewards, thus draining the Steemit rewards well.

In order to correct these drawbacks, the HF20 proposes a new discount account creation system, whose characteristics are listed below.

The possibility of creating accounts via the Steem Power delegation is eliminated.

Users will create discounted accounts by paying the account creation fee through Resource Credits.

When a user calls the function of creation of accounts with discount pays the corresponding values of RCs and increases by one his balance of pending_claimed_accounts (Accounts claimed pending), then when creating the account that variable decreases by 1 point.

The balance of Pending Claims is not transferable or expires, it must be spent by creating accounts.

If a user does not have enough RCs to create the discount account, he can create it by paying the Account Creation Fee (which by the time of HF20 will be 3 Steem), in which case the 3 Steem will not be transferred to the new account as SP, they will be burned (destroyed) instead.

Although the Steem used to create the account is burned (destroyed) will still count for the calculation of RCs of the accounts, this way new accounts can make transactions without having Steem Power.

The number of discount accounts available and the rate at which said variable increases will be established by the witnesses to maintain the stability of the system.

In HF20 the value of the account creation fee account_creation_fee from 0.1 Steem to 3 Steem will be updated, which is a more natural value because it represents what is currently paid when creating the accounts.

3) Changes in the threshold of votes

Currently a user must have at least 1.2 SP to be able to vote, after the HF20 any user with RCs regardless of the amount of SP may cast votes, if the value of the vote is below the threshold necessary to contribute (1,2 SP), the vote will be registered in the chain of blocks but will not contribute anything to the reward of the post.

All votes cast for any account will receive a penalty of approximately 1.2 SP (to discourage spam) thus reducing the incidence of low-value votes from bots seeking to earn healing rewards.

4) Update the printing rate of SBD

Currently in STEEMIT the SBD printing rate is fixed depending on the ratio between the total value of the SBD (measured in STEEM) and the Virtual Supply (Total value of the STEEM + SBD), if the rate of the same or less than 2% is SBD printing is set at 100%, but if it exceeds 5% the printing rate is set at 0% (SBD is no longer produced), intermediate values between 2% and 5% are linearly interpolated. SBD printing between 100% and 0%.

After the Hardfork these percentages will change, when the ratio SBD / VirtualSupply is less than 9% the printing rate of SBD will be 100%, however if the ratio reaches 10% it will stop printing SBD (Printing rate of SBD of 0%), between 9% and 10% the SBD printing rate will vary linearly between 100% and 0%.

For the current values (09/13/2018)

Converting the SBD to Steem to the current internal price 1 Steem = 0.82 SBD

With this value currently the SBD printing rate is 0%, however, after the HF20 it will be 100% because it is a value less than 9%. That is, the rewards will be paid 50% in Steem Power and 50% in SBD.

5) Other relevant changes

At this point I wanted to encompass a series of small changes that the update implies:

The restriction of the minimum amount to Power Down will be eliminated (currently in 1 SP), after the HF20 Power Down can be done with any amount of Steem Power.

The cure window will be reduced from 30 minutes to 15 minutes, that is, the time from which you can earn 100% healing reward.

Currently if a curator votes within 30 minutes of the post, the percentage that stops winning by voting early is won by the author of the post, after HF20 that percentage will be returned to the Reward Pool to pay for new rewards.

After the HF20 the orders of the internal market of Steemit will expire after 28 days, in this way the load of the blockchain is reduced.

The restriction of waiting 20 seconds to comment will be removed, instead you can comment on each block (approximately every 3 seconds).

Correction of double voting exploits: Currently a user can vote many times from his main account (reducing his Voting Power), then delegate to a secondary account and re-vote, or double vote by doing Power Down in the main account and then Power Up in the secondary account, in the implementation of the HF20 this exploit has been corrected.

The return period of the delegation is reduced from 7 to 5 days.

Currently you cannot upvote a publication in the last 12 hours before its completion, however, if you can give it downvote, after the HF20, in the last 12 hours you can give both upvote and downvote but its strength will decrease from 100% (12 hours) to 0% (at the end), that is, if you vote 6 hours before the post expires, the vote will have 50% of the strength that you normally should have.

After the HF20 the beneficiaries of a post will receive the reward in the same modality as the author (Not only in 100% PowerUp as it is currently).

My Personal Opinion about Velocity

The HardFork 20 Velocity is a much awaited update by the entire Steemit community, which will bring several changes to the operation of the blockhain, personally I consider that these changes will have the following effects:

The creation of accounts with discounts can only be used by users with a certain level of Steem Power, the reason for this is that the number of tokens for creation of discount accounts is limited, therefore, the demand for this type of accounts will increase the price to be paid in RC, for other users there is still the option to pay the account creation fee. Regarding the creation of accounts from steemit.com imagine that the account @steem for having a large amount of Steem Power can create accounts with discount.

The update of the SBD printing rate, by generating a greater offer of SBD in the market and lower supply of STEEM, will tend to increase the price of STEEM and reduce the price of the SBD.

The reduction of the window of healing, the elimination of the minimum to do Power Down and the reduction of the period of return of the delegation are quite favorable changes for all the users.

In conclusion we can only prepare and wait until September 25 to see how the community and the market react to these changes that are approaching. So while that day arrives, I can only wish you:

References and recommended readings

• https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/steem-velocity-hardfork-hardfork-20
• https://steemit.com/hf20/@steemitblog/velocity-hardfork-account-creation-guidelines

Thank you for reading!