Steem Successfully Releases Velocity Hard Fork

The Velocity Hard fork was officially presented to the public two months ago, when 17 out of 21 witnesses had to vote in favor of the update.

According to the official announcement, the main change was the transfer of a Bandwidth system to the improved Resource Credits system. The new choice will provide the platform with a sustainable and scalable future.

Steem is one of the few premium blockchains - with the RC system it will be transformed into a more advanced one without the need of special modification of its features. Thanks to the Velocity Hard fork, the account creation system was improved and can be used at lower costs.

One of the difficulties that emerged after the update was that active users received negative RC balances after the hard fork. That is the so-called RC debt which users have accumulated over time and will be fixed with a patch in the next few hours.

The patch will serve as a debt forgiveness program and will restart all negative balances to a zero. The program will be beneficial to small SP holders who will be able to transact sooner.

The RC system also reduced the prices concerning the account creations. The three measurements that will determine the operations costs are the blockchain size, compute time, and state size. Accounts will be created at a discounted rate without any STEEM or using Steem Power.

Challenging Authorities was an idea that was never published. It was supposed to enable a user to pay a small fee and challenge the authority of another user. That would have led to an adverse situation where an innocent account holder would be forced to remove their keys from cold storage. Velocity removed the external code from the update.

The Velocity Hard fork changed the way Dust Vote Threshold behaves. In the past, the rule was implemented to combat blockchain bloat and prevented extremely weak votes. With the fork, users with any amount of SP can make votes as long as they own enough RCs.

The team of Steemit expects that until the full system equilibrium is reached, some users might encounter some negative experiences, which will be resolved in due course.