We kamikaze landed into HF20. I've heard a lot of people say "roll back." "Abandon RCs!" And other things like that. I know the cool and edgy thing these days would be to shit on Steemit and say all the witnesses are a bunch of worthless bitches, but I'd ask that you indulge me for half a second. HF20 is insanely cool. The implementation phase went badly, but the potential of this thing is frankly astounding.
tl;dr HF20 is amazing. Give it time and one more patch, which is already released. This thing should be really fucking awesome.
Mastery Scores
In higher education one of the things that's a really hot topic is called Mastery Scores. When you give a student a C it's really hard to know what that means. Do they under perform in all areas of a course equally or just some skills are really lacking. When you can tie the individual questions to learning outcomes then you can start saying, well, overall Aggroed got a C, it seems like he did really well in lots of areas, but apparently he's weak in humility, he's a Steem fanboy, and @clove71 keeps kicking his ass in Steem Monsters battles.
Once you know where issues are coming from it's a lot easier to address them. When it's all just clumped into one number it's a lot harder to gauge what's going on.
HF20 is like Mastery scores on steroids
The old bandwidth system mostly worked, but it was pretty crude and just one number. It got us here, but we really had no granular detail of the chain.
HF20 and the Resource credit system is really fucking cool. I'm not saying the implementation was awesome. I'm not saying the numbers are perfect right this second. There were bugs that caused VP to drop to 0 and RCs to be negative and new accounts couldn't do shit. That's bad! But a lot of that was a one time error and the other pieces can be fixed with a patch and we can be rockin' and rollin' again. That patch is on the way. I'm literally already building 20.4 (though once again we're held up by RPC replay time rather than just muh witness box)!
The benefits
What did we get for this pain? Apart from a few good life lessons and a better sense of some key needs for the chain I think we got an incredibly detailed read on resource costs for the chain. We'll have more and better information to make decisions than ever before. We'll know what it costs to run a business here, and we'll know what we get for the Steem we power up. This is huge.
Uncertainty is a killer. In the next few weeks there will be improvements to existing sites and new sites that come up that show us unparralled information of the state of the chain and how set it is to grow. We'll have extreme detail on resource consumption on the block and where it's coming from. This is a world class chain analytics improvement. It's really fucking cool. It's not just analytics though. This is real time costs for block activities. This is an intense case of efficiency. I think time will show this is a technical marvel!
Not only that, but we can finally onboard people without it costing Steem. This is a great thing. I think the value of a blockchain is in the people. People are the value. We now have a system that allows more people here. In approximately 24 hours or so these new people should be able to interact and have a reasonable experience here. If not, we'll tweak it again, but I think on first glance this looks like a good patch.
We're set to grow. More people trying to hold the same number of tokens is good for the price. The implementation will hurt us in the short run, but HF20 should be great in the long run.
The worst is behind us on this!
So, yeah, it sucked not catching some bugs. It sucked that VP and RCs didn't work on first landing. It sucked that Steemit said it was successful when 90% of the chain couldn't do anything. It cost us three days, some anxiety, and our ability to act on this chain. That's a small price to pay for this incredible piece of engineering. 20.4 is on it's way. I think it's going to restore the user experience and leave us with an extremely detailed schema of a working blockchain in real time.
I'm sorry that the last few days have been shitty. I'm really excited for what comes next. I'm building and getting 20.4 ready on my backup witness now. I think we'll be in a great place technically and despite the last few days I'm really excited for Steem!