The HardFork 17 rc 2 (release candidate 2) of the Steem blockchain was released and it's available for testing locally. There is even a recommendation for all witnesses to test this locally before launching it, on March 14, which is exactly what I'm going to do.
But before that, let's see what to expect, based on what the release notes are telling. The text quoted is copy/pasted identically from the release notes. I selected only 7 points, which seemed more interesting / impactful to me, but there are more changes, you can read about all of them if you want, there is a link at the end of the article.
1. No More Penalties For Posting More Than 4 Times A Day
Posting rewards are no longer penalized for posting more than 4 times in 24 hours. Originally this was implemented to reduce the impact of bots posting junk content. Ultimately it ended up hurting legitimate authors.
Pretty self-explanatory. Now you can post multiple times and, if your content is appreciated, you can earn accordingly.
2. Rewards Will Have Only A 7 Days Payment Window
99% of votes are cast in the first 7 days after creation. This elimates the need for a second payout to accumulate value to a post and simplifies logic significantly.
Until now, there was a reward window in the first 24 hours (more or less) and then another 30 days window. This will now change into one week. I see this having a significant impact, especially in the beginning. It may very well increase engagement.
3. The Actual Value Of Rewards Will Be Determined On A 30 Days Window
All payouts now look at the prior 30 days of payouts to determine the share of the reward rather than the current pending rshares.
This has something to do with the small variation in rewards you observe during the day. Starting with HF17, the time window won't be limited to the pending rshares, but to the previous 30 days. In the release notes, the potential impact of this measure is described as follows:
With this change, payouts will initially dip and then ramp up over the next 30 days until the reward fund reaches a steady state.
4. Rewards Have Their Own Balance
Again, self-explanatory, all your earnings will go into a separate balance and you have to claim them before being able to use them.
5. Arbitrary Split Of Rewards
All content can now specify beneficiaries to receive a part of their author rewards.
That's what I consider to be the most important change of this HF and a potential game changer. It will impact primarily the app builders, which may see bigger rewards for increasing the ecosystem, but also regular users who can easily divest their rewards into different accounts.
6. Delegating Steem Power
Steem Power can now be delegated to other accounts.
This is, again, big stuff. It will help a lot with new voting guilds and / or communities.
7. No More Mining, Hurray!
PoW has been broken for a long time. Very few people pay attention to it. It is dominated by the same few people and is providing very little value to Steem. Instead of investing even more time fixing it, we have decided to remove it entirely.
This change wins the second place after the arbitrarily split of rewards, in terms of potential growth. Once people will understand that getting Steem is a matter of supporting the platform (by creating content or being a witness in a DPOS system) then everything will be much easier to understand.
This list is not exhaustive, you can see all the release notes here.
All in all, HF 17 will be a very important milestone in the life of Steem/Steemit community. Really looking forward to it!
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
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