Blurt Hard Fork 0.6.0, Witness Bonuses and 4th of July Anniversary

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Dear Blurt Community

A few days ago the foundation and its developers, along with a team of ~30 highly professional and capable witnesses seamlessly upgraded the Blurt Blockchain. Hard Fork 6 was more of a patch update to fix some issues that carried over from HF 5 that required some fixing or tweaking.

All of our Hard Fork changes are listed on the official Blurt Gitlab, simply navigate to milestones

Here are the basics of the changes:

Pending Payout Value Double-Stated

Both the Tags API and Condenser API, which the frontends derive the pending payout value from was showing the pending payout to be double the actual value that occurs on payout. This has now been rectified and pending payouts match the actual.

Please note that prior to this HF you may have had the illusion that you were receiving higher rewards (by double) than you were when you actually got paid out.

Cosmetic Issue in CLI wallet

update_witness AND update_witness_properties commands were showing 0.00 "fee": "0.000 BLURT"

All feeless loopholes have been plugged in the previous HF, but this command echo was showing incorrectly as zero fees, the 0.00 has been removed to avoid misstating the fees.

25/75 Default Rewards Fixed

HF 5 was supposed to deliver 25% liquid rewards as the defacto standard, to help with liquidity for fee-based transactions, however the code for this didn't do what it was supposed to do, this has now been rectified.

All posts will now default to 25% liquid rewards and 75% Powered Up rewards.

If you look at a post on the block explorer https://blocks.blurtwallet.com/#/@angelica7/planning-the-anniversary-for-blurt-eng-esp-de-cn you will see on the left a field showing reward_weight 10000 this is the default to 25/75 rewards, if you see 0 that will be 100% Powered Up rewards. and anything in between will be a prorate of that. Example 5000 should be 12.5% liquid and 87.5% Powered Up rewards.

Fix Blockchain Sync Error

Witnesses were having a difficult time replaying the chain, there was sometimes a sync issue in data circa September 2020, this has been fixed and replays are relatively bug-free now.

Re-adjust rewards curve constant to 2e11

This is perhaps the most controversial change, which has created a bit of stir within the community. You may recall HF 5 doubled the votes of higher-powered Blurt accounts, this was not intentional, the curve changes were not correctly applied in the previous hard fork.

These issues have all been fixed now and we are all back to the pre-HF 5 rewards with the additional curve tweak that HF 5 was supposed to yield in the first place. It is understandable that certain members of the community may not be happy with this but here is my take on it.

Firstly the rewards pool hasn't yet stabilised, it usually takes around 15 days for the rewards pool to stabilise, so I would recommend waiting to see what rewards look like then.

2021-06-06 Edit: Data just recently supplied to me indicates that HF 5 gave large accounts (benchmarked at 500K+ BP) were given a ~25% vote yield advantage due to the unintentional curve error.

The weekend prior to HF 6 Vote Yield of 500k+ accounts was ~69% and Minnow accounts only ~44.4%, this creates an oligarchy, where financially privileged accounts have the ability to self-vote for extra gain as can be seen by some repetitive posts on trending. It isn't healthy to have users depend on whale accounts for rewards, but rather on the network effect of multiple users.

HF 6 has corrected the rewards curve to pre-HF 5 levels and the large account vote yield is now only 46.8%, as of today, and Minnows 46.2%, which makes everyone as close to equal as possible.

As a result, the reward pool will have less claims and as such grow over the next 15 days, Vote Yields have already grown by 2% per day and projected to stabilise at around 60% for both large and minnow accounts by the end of 15 days.

Remember the chain uses reward pool data from the past 15 days so is not yet at equilibrium.

The aforementioned fix was supposed to have come soon after HF 5, but was delayed due to developer availability and as such the large accounts got used to the higher post and curation rewards, in addition pending payouts were double stated by the api, so in essence, users perceived a 125% increase in rewards due to rewards curve and API reporting errors, when infact the actual increase in vote yield for large accounts due to the HF 5 curve error was only ~25% which has been rectified by HF 6.

Also, note that as of HF 5 the rewards pool is responsive to Powered-Up stake, example Staked Supply is currently 211918146.624 BLURT out of a Total Supply of 422995571.694, which is ~50% staked. This to me is quite low, it would be healthier to see Staked Supply in the range of 65% to 80%. The more that is Staked the better the security of consensus (provided that stake is voting) and it also means that there is a trend towards bullish long-term holding of Blurt Power.

The great thing is everyone has the power to help influence the rewards pool, by influencing others to Power Up and to Power Up themselves. So if one is not happy with the current rewards, there is alot of economic scope for them to improve by simply getting users invested.

Given the mediocre Stake Supply numbers, it is prudent that reward supply is restricted, the user @condeas summarised it perfectly: (translated and concisely truncated)

..I welcome the reduction. Less rewards also mean less Blurt in the market. There is too much Blurt and too few people needing it.
Inflation is way too high as measured by users, which is a huge loss in value for Blurt.

From my point of view, the high inflation on Blurt, Steem and Hive is one of the biggest price killers.

Reading this makes alot of sense, flooding the market with rewards does nothing for price, holding alot of nothing is better than holding a bit of something.

I would like to encourage everyone to see out the economic effects of these changes for the next 3 months, if they improve the value of Blurt then awesome, if not then we can always change the parameters, that's the beauty of governance.

While on the topic of governance, I don't recommend that any witness creates FUD about reduced rewards, all witnesses willingly upgraded to this HF, the time for discussion of the effects of the rewards should have been before the HF went live and before you agreed to run the changes, now is the time for unity in our decision, @rycharde didn't single-handedly make these changes, the foundation and all ~30 witnesses of the chain signed off on them as well so we all need to stand by them and not point fingers and create disunity. Some examples being shown are not taking into account Voting Power (VP) of the accounts at the time and are misrepresenting the reduction of rewards, this is very dangerous and breeds disharmony.

We should take a professional approach and evaluate the changes, iterate if needed in another HF, perhaps we constrict rewards in times of limited demand and increase rewards when demand increases, that way we stave off a runaway decline in price.

Give constructive analytical feedback, devoid of fingerpointing, ask what you could have done better to help the governance decision process, be part of the changes, participate, innovate and let's take Blurt forward.

Myth: Splitting large stake into multiple accounts does not yield much additional efficiency maybe 0.6% at max and simply not worth doing unless from a derisking perspective incase of an account hack or loss of keys, to rather split stake out between accounts.

Witness Bonus

I am proud to say that Blurt witnesses are highly efficient, competent and responsive to hard fork upgrades. Last time, HF 3, 4 and 5 iterations were all performed over a space of a mere weekend. Blurt witnesses can hard fork very fast!

As a symbol of gratitude for witness efforts, the foundation has awarded 30 witness accounts 30K Blurt Power each for the timely upgrade to HF 0.6.0. Congratulations witnesses!

Blurt's 4th of July Birthday

@angelica7 recently posted about Blurt's first upcoming birthday,

https://blurtter.com/blurt/@angelica7/planning-the-anniversary-for-blurt-eng-esp-de-cn

It is quite humbling to be a part of the creation of Blurt and seeing it come alive, there is simply no feeling like it. We have faced the greatest of trials and setbacks, but we are still standing and more resilient than ever.

The foundation aims to complete the repairs to the image server and the official blurt.blog and blurt.world frontends as well as the NaN error and incorrect Power-Down initiation period shown on the wallet in time for the 4th of July.

In addition to this we would like to mobilise some Raspberry Pi witnesses into consensus and then procure some media exposure on our unique low carbon footprint consensus model with edge-of-network decentralised distribution for increased censorship immutability and lowered dependencies on datacenters.

I look forward to joining you all for our one year celebration and looking forward to seeing you build and grow Blurt alongside us.

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Don't chase money. Follow your purpose. Do nothing for the sole purpose of money. Do what is right. Do something that helps others and the money will come...what can you do now to create a better tomorrow?!" - Team Fearless

Peace and Love,

Ricardo Ferreira
@megadrive
Blurt Co-Founder