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HF21 & HF22

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Wolf
@therealwolf
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So, we're less than 2 days into HF21 and there's is going to be another Hardfork, called HF22 at 3 PM UTC, today? What's going on?

Well. The transition to HF21 wasn't as bad as HF20, not nearly, but it also wasn't completely smooth.

As you might know, the blockchain halted due to a problem, which is a good thing in terms of maintaining security when something goes wrong, so it can be fixed, instead of going further and risking even worse things happening.

Now, Steem was halted for roughly 6-7 hours and in that time top witnesses, backup witnesses, technical geniuses and Steemit Inc. worked together to solve it. And we did.

HF21 - What happened?

If you've been following me on twitter (therealwolf42) you witnessed everything unfolding live. If not, here is the TL;DR:

The blockchain halted. We searched for the problem. We found it. A fix was created (@vandeberg), but with the knowledge that there might be potential other problems, with a similar root cause.

Now, the good thing was: the chain could be restarted again (by none other than @gtg & other witnesses, incl. myself joined to secure the chain) and all services, apps, exchanges & users could use Steem again.

Before you might wonder, the chain wouldn't have been restarted if we couldn't preclude for dangerous bugs to be still around. However, we knew that smaller bugs might still be around. Which brings us to HF22.

While the fix worked for HF21, there were still a few problems with downvoting & delegation, which had a similar root cause as the HF21 halt. And to fix this, we need to make another hardfork (HF22), meaning an irreversible change to the blockchain.

This is going to happen in less than 5 hours. (3 PM UTC)

HF22 - 29th August 3 PM UTC

I'm very confident that we'll get this done without any hiccups, but I'm still 101% present once the timer hits 3 PM UTC. Because if there's one thing HF21 should have told us: problems can always arise, but how we handle them, that's where the real value shows itself. DPoS might not be the perfect consensus method, but it works pretty damn well to secure a blockchain.

So, as I said in my last post (which you should def. read):

I'll see you guys on the other side.

Wolf

PS: How are you liking HF21 so far? Free downvotes are pretty cool, right? And more curation rewards makes Steempower suddenly much more appealing. But let me know your thoughts in the comments.