Last night, I read from steemd.com about the scheduled date for the next update of the steemit protocol, popularly known as 'hard fork' (hf) 19.0 . This steemit hf 19.0, termed STEEM EQUALITY, from the proposal, is scheduled to hold on Tuesday, 20th of June, 2017 at 15.00 UTC .
The main focus of the proposed steem equality hard fork is to improve the rewards curve. Moreover, a very important area to highlight, according to the official hf19 pre-release 3 weeks ago from @steemitblog is increasing each vote's impact by 4X
Vote Impact
The changes to the impact of a 100% vote are more material. A 100% vote will be 4 times more powerful once HF19 is completed. As it stands now a single 100% vote uses only 0.5% of your remaining voting power (voting power regenerates fully over a 5 day period). That means real users would need to vote 40 times a day at full power to use all of their voting power. This leaves users who are less active unable to fully leverage their voting power. After this change, a single 100% vote will use 2% of your remaining voting power, meaning that 10 full-power votes a day will now exhaust the majority of your voting power. Of course, if one does not wish to use this much voting power in a single vote, anyone is still free to lower the power-percentage of their votes accordingly.Users can also feel free to simply upvote-at-will because a vote only consumes a percentage of the remaining voting power, not the total. Imagine “voting power” as a swimming pool that is constantly being refilled by the rain. Every time you upvote you reduce the amount of water (in this case “voting power”) from the pool by a percentage (i.e. it’s not like you are constantly removing 500 gallons from the lake). The next time you vote you are removing another percentage from an already diminished supply. That means there are still no limits on how much you can vote, just that the more you vote the more you incrementally decrease the amount of voting power you have (the water in the pool). To get a better sense of how powerful your votes are and the rate at which that power diminishes simply observe how much your full power upvotes increase the rewards of content creators and you should get an intuitive sense of how the algorithm works.
Source: https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/2hfxx1-pre-release-hf19-linear-rewards
Major Implication
A major implication, from my understanding, will be that steem power is needed in other to benefit from curation reward, depending on how much steem power and vests that I have. For example, my vote (at 100%) is currently worth $0.16, so after the hard fork (hf) 19.0, I will begin to see it at $0.64 (4 times more).
Accumulate Steem Power
If you a Steemian and have not started accumulating steem power, the smart thing, I think, would be to get as much as you can before hf19, especially with the current price of steem selling below $2
It seems that very few would want to 'power down' after hf 19, because of the benefits that will be experienced from voting power increase, an action which might cause scarcity and as a result increase the price of steem in the coin market.
How to Accumulate Steem Power
Steem power can be earned by creating and posting very good content or bought. Check out this video of how to buy steem power using fiat and this other video on voting and it's benefits.
This is just a minnow's perspective of the upcoming hard fork 19.0.
Meanwhile, the current number of registered accounts in steemit is getting to 200,000
For further reading and viewing,
https://steemit.com/steem/@craig-grant/steem-blockchain-hardfork-19-will-drive-demand-for-steem-power-and-increase-the-price-of-steem