Steemit Inc has announced the official release of v0.20.6
Hello Steemians, we have released version 0.20.6 of steemd. This is primarily a bug fix release, featuring several optimizations and fixes for the RC plugin which will reduce reindex times and create a smoother experience for users.
How will this impact us Steemians?
The RC calculation has been optimised and changed in order to be more accurately calculated and although it is claimed to be more aggressive at high usage level, it should preserve current pricing. Negative RC are now capped to no less than -1.66% which requires about 2 hours to regenerate.
In a previous post First HF20 success at taking down a spammer? I mentioned an observation from 
Any time we change the RC system, some of this is going to happen on one side or the other. If we have two competing non-consensus rulesets, A and B, the transactions that get included only have to pass A or B. And some of those transactions will fill for form not A, B. From an A node perspective, it looks wrong. The transaction shouldn't be allowed. When it is permissible by B.
I already knew about this one, two different versions of the rules will obviously behave differently but that wasn't really my point which was that the B rule set is now allowing a big spammer to spam again.
With RCs this gets really tricky because if the new ruleset is more expensive than the other, then transactions allowed in prior are going to cost more retroactively than when they were included. This could lead to a poor user experience if they are suddenly out of RCs, or even negative, if they thought they still had RCs. To prevent this from happening, in 0.20.6, we reset the resource pools to 200% their equilibrium to tank the retroactive prices and prevent users from going negative. What this means is there are users that may be negative in 0.20.5 that aren't in 0.20.6.
OK, so they have reset the resource pools to 200% their equilibrium which means that some users with negative RC now will be able to interact with the blockchain again when all witnesses will switch to v0.20.6. That's good news for the little Red Fish but does this make sense when someone with -19,332% RC can now suddenly
"come back to life"?
To further complicate matters, 0.20.6 is more expensive for some operations and less expensive for others. There are going to be some transactions that 0.20.5 rejects and some that 0.20.6 rejects and each are going to complain about the other including those transactions until all witnesses are running 0.20.6.
Obviously.
Now, lets have a look at this change mentioned "Negative RCs are limited to 2 hours worth of regeneration. (#3050)". The code change related to this can be seen at https://github.com/steemit/steem/pull/3050/files. The line of code I'm interested in is this one (highlighted in green):
The RC now has a maximum negative percent of 1.66%, so that means our friend 
Is this bad news? Not necessarily. It does mean that
What's next?
I think that despite the -1.66% cap, it should be OK as the RC should still slow down spammers by a lot. I will proceed and upgrade my seed node and observe the logs again from that perspective.
Related content
- Witness Earnings Report - 2018-10-22
- First HF20 success at taking down a spammer?
- My Sumo Logic dashboard is now tracking few more Steem block production events
- Witness Earnings Report - 2018-10-15
Summary of some of my other contributions
| Project | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Steemed Phish | Chrome browser extension to make external links more visible and alert you on Phishing/Scamming links | Steemed Phish |
| Dtube Community Support | This project by  allows users to run their own IPFS node and pin videos in order to cache them for longer. Dtube has the tendency of deleting non-popular video after few days only. I helped Dockerizing the project for an easier deployment on almost any platform. I've also contributed by running two nodes, one in Australia and one in Canada to cache #teamaustralia and #teamnz videos. | Dockerizing Dtube Community Support |
| DiscoSteem Bot | This is a Discord/Steem bot project by  . When I started Steemulant Bot for the Vietnamese community, I didn't know the existence of DiscoSteem Bot and wanted something written in NodeJS. I've ended up continuing my own project as it contains code and logic for personal use and for the Vietnamese community. But I've decided to share some useful features that can benefit the users of DiscoSteem Bot and will continue to add more functionalities as I go. | Dockerizing DiscoSteem Bot |
| A Dollar A Day | This is a project run by  and will donate 15 SBD every day to a charity | "A dollar a day" fundraiser - Karaoke Singing: Le chanteur malheureux |
| Team Vietnam | I started a new Vietnamese community on Discord and developed @teamvn, a community bot to help grow the Vietnamese community and help them create higher quality content. | |
| POCKET-JS | This is my Javascript (NodeJS) port of the POCKET confirmer by  . POCKET is an experimental crypto token on top of STEEM. | POCKET-JS Confirmer |
| Skippy Bot | I've written this Discord bot for  , it has three main features: a level bot (like Tatsumaki but with Australian animal images), a chatter bot and a footer banner generator for both ,  and  | Witness Update 2018-07-30 - Team Australia's Skippy Bot |
Credits
- The image at the top has been generated with the Canva app using my own photo.