No More Dust Votes From This Hard Fork Forward

It hasn't even been two weeks since my post where I gave some advice to newcomers on how not to waste their votes.

The main focus of the post was dust votes and avoiding using them when payout would be dust. And the advice is still useful... for about two months, hopefully.

So, what happens on HF26 that I wasn't aware of when I wrote the post, even if I consider myself relatively well-informed regarding the public discussions/presentations around Hive core blockchain developments?

Well, while searching for something else I came across this piece of information:

That's from an 8.5-months old progress update on Hive work by @blocktrades.

I wonder if I missed that or if my mind started to make room for newer information because I read all his posts. :)

Anyway, let's take them one by one, but in reverse order, since I talked about dust votes, and this change practically will remove this category and make them similar to 'normal' votes.

From hard fork 26 onwards,

Dust Votes Are Fully Considered As Votes

The first consequence which is listed by blocktrades is that one cannot delete a comment/post which has only received dust votes.

To be honest, I wouldn't have thought about that consequence as the main one. Since "deleted" comments/posts on the blockchain aren't really deleted, it doesn't seem like a drawback.

When I started writing this post I thought dust votes and the $0.02 minimum payout to receive rewards are connected.

But as I typed, I realized they might refer to two different things, and we could no longer have the distinction between normal and dust votes after HF26, but still need a $0.02 payout to receive rewards.

We will probably need clarifications about that. But I'm inclined to think the limit on payouts remains.

Vote Edits Are No Longer Penalized With No Curation Rewards

I wonder how many people knew that if they change their vote, they forfeit their curation rewards. And if they did, how many were careful about that.

I'm pretty sure not many knew. I knew but often remembered after changing my vote. And that often happened because an interface was late in showing I already voted for a post/comment.

Well, I'm glad this one gets fixed. This is something that made sense when vote ordering was important. Now it is meaningless to penalize people for changing their votes.

I can't believe how much we have evolved regarding curation from the old blockchain! 5min curation window? Curation order? That was the paradise of bots.

Eliminated Rule That Prevented Voting More Than Once per Block

This rule was probably a disincentive for bots when it was introduced. But it affects people too if they vote more often than 3s. That can happen if you vote for comments.

And since nowadays the incentives for curation bots practically disappeared, I believe removing this rule is a good decision.

Final Words

Blocktrades promised a post where he puts together all changes introduced in HF26 and other updates that don't affect consensus but which will be rolled out at the same time as HF26.

That will probably be a pretty long post. Who even remembered these curation-related changes?

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