If you look at my steemd page, you can see that my account is just over 60 days old. If you investigate a little further you'll find that I only became active on the 23rd of September. That's two days before HF20. I started by upvoting a lot of posts, writing a few comments and I made my first post. At the end of the day, I still had ample bandwidth left to do anything I'd want.

Then HF20 happened

I had a fantastic -11100% Resource credits. That'd mean no interactions with the Steem blockchain for the next 500 days. If it wouldn't have been reset, I would have left the platform forever.

I had to wait for a day or two, then the negative balances were reset. I got my 100% RC and started to interact with Steem again. I upvoted two posts, followed two people and made a comment. Before HF20 I would have consumed about 0.02% of my bandwidth and only a tiny bit of my voting power. This time I didn't have any RC left and my voting power decreased by 50%.

I will forgive Steem for the voting power decrease. It didn't bother me anyway, because I had to wait for at least three days before I could post again. By that time, my voting power would have been fully recharged as well.

The colossal RC costs is a different story. Before the hardfork, I made two posts and wrote seven comments in two days, all while having more than enough bandwidth left for other activities. After the hardfork, I could only write two comments in total, leaving me without enough bandwidth to also upvote some posts. With those costs, I could make about 11 upvotes every 5 days. That's not even enough to ever get my voting power below 90%. With those costs, interacting with the Steem community wasn't possible.

The fix

Update 0.20.4 provides optimized parameters which allow me and my fellow Minnows to use Steem normally again. For me, this update confirms the failing of HF20 as well as its success. I don't have estimates, but the bandwidth pricing seems to be fair now. I can easily empty my voting power and still have enough bandwidth left to make a post. The pricing now is a lot better than before HF20, because back then you had so much bandwidth that you didn't ever run out unless you were a bot.

But that doesn't take away that I couldn't use the Steem platform for four consecutive days. I understand that a hard fork always causes a disruption in the continuity of a blockchain and I understand that you can't test every possible situation before deploying. I know there's a testnet where the hardfork was tested before applying it to the main blockchain, But with the issues we saw with this hardfork, it almost seems like you didn't test it on an actual blockchain at all.

Don't get me wrong, I do think HF20 will be a milestone in the history of Steem, including the resource credits. Besides that, I know few software projects that are so fast to address the issues that arise after deployment and the actual hardfork went smooth, without issues. Nowhere in the process was the blockchain unavailable, we just didn't have access to it. That is something to be proud of, especially considering that this is the twentieth time you pulled this off. Just don't forget to think about everything that could potentially go wrong before pushing the code.

These are my opinions on HF20, but I'd like to hear how my fellow Steemians experienced this hardfork and if you encountered comparable issues to what I've described in this post.

“If we want to be serious about quality, it is time to get tired of finding bugs and start preventing their happening in the first place.” — Alan Page