So I am going to do something here that I, quite frankly, usually frown on. That is, taking a post from one of the big wigs (
However, even though I resteemed the latest steemitblog post regarding HF20, I know I have a lot of new followers for whom this will sound like rocket science, so I wanted to put a few of the points into easily digested chunks. If you feel this is not a service to my followers, flag away, but I am going to try to make this as useful as possible.
If you missed the announcement, you can check it out in full here: Hardfork 20 Velocity Development update.
It's headlined by an awesome dude on a motorcycle. I don't have awesome dude budget, so I went and found this guy on pixabay. He's not as fast, but just as cool.
First Question.... What's a Hard Fork?
Good question Steve. (Who'se Steve? I dunno) In simple terms, a Hard Fork is like a new version. When you get software in version 2.0, 3.0 and so one, Blockchain gets Hard Forks. This Hard Fork is named Velocity, and is the 20th such occurrence for Steem. For those wondering about a timeline of the Hard Forks, you will have to look elsewhere, I dunno. I know that 19 happened in June, which means, just like most of you, I have not been here long enough to experience a Hard Fork, so this is new and exciting to me as well.
Let's take the changes one by one.
Changes to 30 minute Curation Window
Once upon a time, there was no window where it was "bad" to upvote a new post. You could go in and give your upvote and get all the curation rewards because you "discovered" great content. Then the bots arrived. And the bots were evil, and the bots voted all the cool stuff right away so they could collect massive curation rewards. The 
The dev team got their heads together and came up with a plan. If we make the curation rewards not so much for the first 30 minutes, then the bots all voting early won't get any reward, and the people who really read the posts will win!
The plan sounded good in theory, but no sooner had the curation curve been set, than the bot builders simply programmed their bots to vote later in the reward window. Ooops.
Rather than reverse course entirely, a new partial solution has been found. The new Hard fork will reduce the penalty window from 30 minutes to 15 minutes, making it easier for actual humans to vote on content when they find it instead of sitting to wait out a timer. This may help to an extent. But bot developers will be just as good at programming their bots to vote at 14 minutes as they were at 30.
I see this as a positive move, but a negligible change.
Eliminating Self-voting rewards through curation
In a move to try to lessen some of the advantage to self voting described here:
If authors vote for themselves right away, they get their author rewards, 100% of the curation rewards from their vote, plus a portion of the curation rewards coming from everyone who votes for the post after them.
Basically, while you can upvote yourself, you can't curate yourself. So the 25% of your vote that should go to curators WILL go to curators, and not back to you. This makes sense, and will hopefully drive people to go and vote on some things they didn't write and spread the reward pool out a bit.
This is a Good Change, though people who are used to upvoting themselves with 100% return will be disappointed.
Dust Vote Threshold Removal
This is a big one for newer accounts. Your vote, if worth less than a penny, is basically considered "dust" in the system. That's okay because even if you don't see the rewards change on a post you vote, it does in some miniscule way, which not only helps the author, but helps you with curation rewards to build up your account. However, as you vote more and more often, your portion of a penny gets smaller and smaller until it is effectively zero.
In the past when you reached this point of nil returns, you were disabled from voting. The system would reject your upvote, and you may not know the reason why. it would continue to do this until your Voting Power restored enough for your vote to have a value that could be applied to the post.
With the new change, you will be able to continue to vote to your heart's content. The system will recognize the vote and add it to the upvote tally. However, the Author will get no added reward, and you will earn no curation reward. But you do get the satisfaction of knowing your vote was counted.
I think this is good and bad. Yes, everyone likes to have their vote counted. But the effort should be more in the way of educating new users on Voting Power and the need to conserve it on some level. I did this when I started, I was voting everything under the sun and got in to the vote could not be tallied errors, I had no understanding until someone on Discord explained Voting Power to me. We need to teach people how it works, not just make it easy for them to blindly run around upvoting stuff with no effect. In fact, as I type this I like it less and less. If you think you are upvoting and earning curation, when in fact you are not, then you get more irritated that you have no curation rewards coming into your wallet. This is where we need to teach people rather than let them just flail in the system.
Application of Shift to all votes
This one has the most comments over on the blog post as of my writing. And frankly, I am not sure I can explain it very well. Basically, each vote will be shifted down by 1.219 SP. So if you have 100 SP, your vote weight will be 98.7% instead of 100%. I don't understand maths, but I understand the intent, and that is this;
There are vote spammers out there who give tiny votes to a lot of posts for curation rewards and visibility. Just visit the introduceyourself tag for examples of vote spammers. Then there is the "This post has received 1% appreciation" votes. If you have a slider (500 SP or higher) and you vote at 100% then the 1.219 SP reduction won't change much. But if you are voting 1000 times with 1% vote weight then that 1.219 SP will cancel out the majority of that 1% vote, reducing your curation and making it less palatable to vote spam as a way of increasing curation rewards.
Results on this may vary. The larger your account, the less you will notice this change I think, and I am not sure if it will discourage vote spammers even a little bit. We'll see.
Proof of work account mining vbia softfork
Proof of Work?!?! Wait! Steem is all about Proof of Stake! That's the whole point isn't it?
From mining you came, and to mining you shall return. In the early days there was a pre-mine for Steem, and that is how a lot of people got a lot of Steem early on. This is not that. What this sounds like to me is that miners will be in the system to mine fresh accounts for new people coming on board. This will effectively speed up the sign up verification process for (Hopefully) immediate sign up and account approvals. This will not happen right away in Hard Fork 20, but the road is being paved for it, and it will be added as a soft fork on top of HF20.
I kind of look at this like the people mining to help birth the cryptokitties. They are mining a specific portion of the blockchain to assist in a function and getting paid for it.
I'm pretty excited about the prospect of this, as I am in the process of building a little mining rig, and if I can point it at my favorite crypto, and do so profitably, I am down for sure!
Removal of Power Down Restriction
Up to now, an account had to have 10 times the account creation fee in Steem Power in order to be able to Power Down their Steem Power into Steem. This was put in place to prevent faucet abuse. From here on out, because the account creation fees will be "burned" (presumably to the miners) there is less financial reason for someone to create and then power down accounts. So the restriction is being removed, and if you want to power down 16 STEEM Power (as an example) you could do so.
Negligible impact as most users who are here to stay are doing anything but powering down.
Update to witness price feed format
I'm not a witness, if you are reading this, there is a good chance you aren't a witness, so this really doesn't mean much to us. But the last bit is a change to the rule on the Steem and SBD Witness price feed guidance, basically making all witnesses comply to something most of them already do anyway.
Result of the change: Witnesses gonna Witness. (i.e. I have no idea)
Conclusion
So basically, these changes are part of laying the groundwork for getting the blockchain ready for SMTs. There are a couple of changes here that will affect our daily user experience in ways that most of us won't REALLY notice unless we are watching for it. Hopefully, the biggest change we will see out of this is when mining for accounts comes into play and we can onboard our friends in a matter of minutes instead of days.
Insert fireworks and flowers of excitement here. In fact... let me do that for you...
We'd certainly prefer those fireworks to ones like this:
Thanks for reading! I hope you found the information useful! Let me know in the comments if you have questions, and I will do my best to come up with answers for you!