Stepping out after HF25

Congratulations and Big Thanks go out to the Consensus Witnesses and developers for a very smooth hardfork! A little over two hours ago, HF25 went "live" and it was one of the smoothest I've seen! Whoo hooo!

So, here we are now, stepping out slowly and testing everything...

For those who missed all the posts leading up to the Hardfork, here is the single most important post to have read about it, published by the official Hive account@hiveio account:

For anyone who feels the language in that post is too complex, I have distilled the most important changes for the average user here:

• We no longer have to wait 5-minutes before voting a newly-published post in order to maximize rewards for the author and our own curation. Now, voting any time in the first 24-hours will achieve maximum rewards.


• Measures have been to stabilize the value of HBD to be closer to USD $1, as was originally intended.


• Instead of only being able to convert HBD -> HIVE, we will now be able to go the other way, too, converting HIVE -> HBD.


• Interest has been paid recently on all HBD, but now interest will only be paid on HBD in the "Savings" section of our Hive wallets.


• A new option will allow for recurring payments for subscriptions and such.


• Witness votes have never expired in the past, but now they will expire after one year for any account has not cast any governance votes (i.e., for witnesses or proposals). That will prevent votes from being counted on accounts that are no longer being used.


• Votes will now be allowed on posts that have already paid-out. No monetary rewards will be given for those votes, but the author will now be able to see that their post has been appreciated by yet another person.

Yes, this was one of the smoothest hardforks I have seen. In fact, I have not yet seen any glitches since the fork was deployed ^{_{[~knock on wood~]}}. So, let's step out with both feet and enjoy the changes to our blockchain! And please remember to Thank the witnesses & developers for a job well-done!