One of my top favorite quotes
What does not kill us only makes us stronger.
This quote applies to HF 20 because it has been harsh on the community and it was so hard to see so few transactions on the blockchain as soon as the Hard Fork was implemented. Who is to be held accountable? I think that the witnesses and the Steemit Inc. are the ones responsible for the halt of Steemit. I am truly sorry that me and my witness team could not have seen this coming and did not test the hardfork as much as it should have been tested. That is why I want to try come up with a solution for this problem.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned here and new ways to approach problems. Many witnesses are very active on the steem.chat to solve any kinds of problems that do arise. But we most certainly need a solution to stop them from arising in the first place.
Main lessons we have learned:
- Never blindly trust the hardforks provided by Steemit Inc.
- Don't rush into hard forks, under the pressure of benefits because they might cause more problems later
- Do a lot of real life testing before implementing
- Do some more testing after that
The good:
So far I am satisfied with the fact that there will be less spamming and 
The fact that we can onboard more users and grow past Reddit also is great news even though there have been so many complaints about the HF implementation itself lately. In the end we have all survived it and more and more people keep coming back. Our blockchain keeps improving and this is definitely a good thing.
How can we test the Hard Forks
As far as I know, a few of the top witnesses (
So why not make a domain something like https://testing.steemforks.com especially for testing new hard forks? I mean many of the non-top-20-witnesses can also contribute and help to test them. There are about 100 active non-top-20-witnesses who can help. I am most certainly in for it.
Can we set it up? Can anyone of the top 20 witnesses comment and help us build such an infrastructure for all of us?
What will we need?
- Another 20+ witness servers for simulating the hard fork outside of the main blockchain?
- A new domain with a copy of Steemit.com
- Another Steemd.com or Steemdb.com for pointing to new blockchain?
- 100+ testers who can submit bugs
Update
Right now, in the process of replaying the v0.20.5, should be finished in about 3 hours.
From 25th of September up till now, have done a lot of replays due to the patches.
