Top 50 Witness Rankings on Hive about to be Reshaped?

Exactly one year and three days ago hard fork 25 happened on Hive. That was a very good hard fork in hindsight, both through its upgrades and by the way it was prepared and executed.

About one of its upgrades I want to talk right now.

If you are active on Hive and have been a user for longer than a year, you might've remarked this popup on PeakD when you log in:

Something similar may appear on other interfaces, but I was reminded of the topic by the notification on PeakD.

What is this referring to?

Let's go directly to the source, as it was presented on @hive.io account:

witness and proposal votes by an account expire after one year if the account stops actively making governance-related votes

And their subsequent explanation:

This change was made to ensure that old votes from dormant accounts don't unduly impact governance decisions for Hive. It will enable Hive to find a new balance between incumbent block producers and new competitors for those positions.

Some things to take into consideration:

• this change was introduced 368 days ago. So there are 3 more days to the full year when effects will kick in.
• this update didn't work retroactively, as far as I remember, meaning that the countdown started from the time the hardfork happened, even if some accounts are long-time dormant; this means we might have many votes expire after three days, all at the same time. Correct me if I'm wrong, please! governance-related votes mean voting on witnesses, setting a proxy or voting on DHF proposals; if you've done any of that in the past year, you're good; exception: if you had a proxy set, your votes on witnesses or proposals are ignored** - to fix the problem you have to either remove the proxy and set it again or to remove it and vote your own witnesses/proposals

The easiest way to handle this is to log into PeakD with all your accounts. If you get a 'Governance Votes Expiring Soon' notification in the bottom-right corner, then you should act and make a governance-related operation on Hive. There is a Witnesses button which you can use to go directly to manage your witness votes.

If you had set yourself as a proxy for your alt accounts, you still need to go to your alts and remove the proxy and set it again.

Will this one-time moment 3 days from now create havoc in the witness rankings? To be honest, I don't think so. Maybe in the mid-lower part of the hierarchy. But it's interesting to see how it'll play out.

Going forward, there shouldn't be any more such moments of potentially significant changes in the ranking, unless a whale becomes inactive, as votes will expire exactly 1 year after your last governance-related operation.

Thoughts about it?

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