First, since many of you are asking what the heck is a Hardfork...
You can think of a hardfork as an update to Steemit (and/or the Steem blockchain) that changes things like features on the user interface, formulas for things like voting or curation rewards, etc. I highly recommend following the @SteemitBlog user so you can see official announcements from the Steemit Inc team.
So why should you be excited about the next Hardfork (0.19)?
While you can find the official pre-release statement for Hardfork (HF) 0.19 here, I'll make it short and sweet for you. When this 'update' happens..
Your Votes will Matter MORE!
Right now, votes have are based off of the square (SP^2) of your Steem Power. Technically this has an underlying piece called rshares, but let's not complicate things...just think of it in terms of Steem Power. A person with 1000 SP has a LOT more influence than somebody with 100 SP (imagine this for whales with 500k SP or more!)
1000^2 = 1,000,000
100^2 = 10,000
In this model, a person with 10 times more SP, have 100 times more influence.
They are going to be changing this to be linear instead of squared. Meaning someone with 10 times more SP will have 10 times the influence (compared to 100.) Essentially, this means for newer and smaller users, YOU'RE VOTE WILL HAVE MORE INFLUENCE!
More Influence, but Less Votes
One thing I wanted to point out with HF 0.19 is that while 100% votes (i.e. a full slider bar vote) will be able to give more rewards to others, the number of votes we have available without having our voting power regeneration keep up will be much lower.
I have a post that get's more in depth about the slider bar and vote power percentage in works and posted today.
But the basics...right you we are allowed 40 - 100% votes a day without our vote power dropping (more than the regen rate.) After this hardfork, we will have 10 - 100% votes a day without the voting power drop-off. This simply means that if you want to give out more than 10 votes a day, you may wish to split your votes, like 20 - 50% votes or 100 - 10% votes...that's up to you.
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Fork in the Water