What is hardfork 20 (hf20)?

The focus of this hardfork is on improving the process of account creation and reducing the friction involved in onboarding millions of new users

The primary focus of hf20 seems to be the onboarding process and to position steem so it can gain and support a user base similar to Reddit. To support this, changes need to be made in the new account creation process.

The proposal plans on burning STEEM with the new account creation process and offering a minimum bandwidth to all new accounts. Instead of giving new accounts STEEM power, the account fee would be destroyed and removed from the token supply. A minimum bandwidth assigned to new accounts that would allow new users to perform actions on the blockchain without the requirement of STEEM power.

One of the key areas limiting growth of Steem is the cost of creating accounts. With the stake that Steemit had, it would take nearly 12 years to reach half of the size of Reddit number of accounts (234 million unique users a month) and undelegate Steem Power continuously to reach those numbers. Simply put, it did not scale and if they want to grow to become the disruptive technology it is needed to remove this barrier.

Hard fork 20 also plans on offering discounted account creation with mining. Mining would not be used for block production, only to supply payment for new accounts. It is suggested to use scrypt, Litecoin's battle tested algorithm. This would be in addition to other account creation options and is not required for creating all new accounts.

Finally, hf20 proposes removing the option to create accounts with delegation. This was available to offer a discounted account creation process that required less of a STEEM investment. It is believed the new minimum bandwidth proposal and discounted account creation through mining will solve this problem.

These changes will also allow the Vote Dust Threshold to be removed. This was added to avoid vote spamming with extremely low vote weights.