Hard Fork 20 is on track to land in three days and I have received a lot of questions about the changes. I will cover the changes to voting power and how powering up and powering down will be affected.

Under Hard Fork 20, voting power will be represented by mana and is directly influenced by your steem power. This is a departure from the idea of a voting pool to keep track of your voting power.

Mana

Mana is a measure of your unspent rshares based on how much steem power you own. This is a big change from the current system where voting power is a state on your account and not affected at all by your steem power.

Under Hard Fork 19

Under the current system, let's say you own 1,000 steem power and you are at 50% voting power. Any new Steem Power you add assumes the same state as your account. So powering up 100,000 Steem Power would effectively be 50,000 steem power worth of usable voting power.

Under Hard Fork 20

Under the Hard Fork 20, 1,000 steem power would grant you 1,000 steem power worth of rshares reflected in your manabar. If you then power up 100,000 steem power, you would gain rshares equivalent to 100,000 steem power. This allows you to fully take advantage of your new power-up immediately regardless of your current manabar.

Steem now has a power level

Steem (liquid and powered up) will now have a power level attached to it. Powering up steem will increase your manabar by the number of votable rshares represented by the stake being powered up. If you power up 100,000 steem power, you will have an additional 100,000 steem power at 100% voting power to use immediately.

Powering down

On the other hand, powering down now has a direct impact on your voting power (mana). If you have 13,000 steem power and you initiate a power down (13 weeks), 1,000 steem power worth of votable shares will be removed from your manabar. If you decide to power that 1,000 steem back up, it will immediately have 100% of its votable rshares added to your manabar for immediate use.

Delegation

Delegation follows the same rules but is based on your current mana. If you have 10,000 steem power and you want to delegate 10,000 steem power you would need to be 100% mana. If you have 80% mana, you can only delegate 8,000 steem power. This is to prevent draining the VP on an account and then delegating it. Although the 7 day cooldown was always in place for preventing that over long term.