Steemit Update: The time is now to get noticed and what is it.

What is this about?

In reference to the update post by steemitblog: https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/announcing-steem-0-14-0-release-candidate a new update will be launched September 13 at 11:00am with a number of changes primarily economic based. This post is about what you can do to prepare for the changes to maximize your success.

If this is of great importance to you here's a simple countdown: http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/to?iso=20160913T11&p0=179&msg=Realease+of+0.14.0+to+drop+votes+from+40+to+5&font=cursive
Keep in mind developers sometimes shift around times depending on a number of factors.

The time is now to get noticed!

Currently a whale, bot or anyone can vote 40 times a day without it negatively impacting their voting power. Voting power helps promote accurate voting by rewarding those that stay within the limits. Now this count is going to 5 votes per day! This has a 5 day regeneration period, so basically if you continually go beyond the limits your voting power will be significantly impacted.

Consider this, if you post 4 posts a day which is what very active users day, and up vote your content then you have 1 vote left for yourself to promote someone else. However, personally I think that's a lot of writing/photos/whatever to really create quality content, so let's assume 2 posts per day as a high-end active user that's enough to promote 2 other users. In addition bots, or active voters will vote for many posts currently, not out of mal-intent, it is either, they have a list of authors that consistently do well, or they just are really active in promoting others.

So, if bots and everyone will have less votes, they will hone their votes on the best of the best. You still have about two weeks to shine, and get on the radar of supporters, but once the vote drops it obviously will be more difficult to get in front of other users. Otherwise if you're unknown it may be like finding a needle in the hay stack. Specifically, there @robinhoodwhale idea which I thought was great, will now be limited for it's own good to 35 less users a day. To get great curator rewards users will focus on those that others are keen to vote on so this creates a centralization of votes. So it looks like ~300M vest by comment I just saw from ned. A user or bot can adjust vote percent to increase overall vote count to avoid negative consequences but vote more. A great comment calculated: 5 votes at 100% 10 votes at 50% 20 votes at 25% 25 votes at 20% 50 votes at 10% 100 votes at 5%.

comment by ned:

Create the best content you can now!

The focus of your next two weeks if you plan to keep up payouts should be to create amazing content above and beyond potentially what you already do. By getting noticed and truly succeeding consistently, you have a higher chance of being on a bot list, a whales radar, and the others looking for great content that also has a reverse positive economic incentive. In addition within this period you have a better chance to make money, so by focusing on these next two weeks you have a much higher chance of earning rewards.

Will this hurt bots?

Proportionally to everyone else. You will get 5 votes and they will get 5 votes. If everyone all votes to the same post and the reward is larger than curator rewards will be proportionally larger. Is that good? Well to be honest most people running bots are technologically advanced, have linux servers and probably have a good amount of Steempower and one could counter assume Steem. Their profits may reduce, and if the little guy is tracked into making it easier to identifying the high reward posts theirs will go up. However, if they're not selective than the lottery approach of voting anything decent over 30 minutes is impacted, and you'll be forced to think a bit longer on your choice. Simply it will be harder to automate, and centralize good users.

Economic Stability Attempts

When Steem Dollars, or SBD is more than 2% of the market cap or 2% of the dollar value of STEEM the rewards will be linearly decreased up to 5% where if SBD is 5% of the market cap 100% of the reward will be in steem. So for example if the market cap is 3% then you would receive rewards, 60% SBD and 40% STEEM. STEEM market cap is currently $116,641,543, with current SBD supply 2,322,240.732. This will change even hours after the post. Currently this would be 1.990920792% so we are drifting right near the threshold, meaning it may be relatively immediate when this is initiated. This effectively hedges users into STEEM, the assumption I would make is in the hopes of stabilizing the supply of SBD to support smooth conversion, while distributing STEEM value to users, who ideally would support the long term price. I'm not sure about the last point, but I assume if you receive something you'd prefer it to appreciate in value.

Escrow - Merchant features

Adding escrow may seem odd, but consider this is the ground work of doing peer-to-peer exchange. This is great for other use cases, so to me this says either we are considering creating a store, or, we think others will build this and it will expand the STEEM use cases and conversely increase demand. If you don't know what escrow is, you enter a financial contract with three parties. You, the business entity and a ideally honest mediator. If you and the business entity agree, funds are released or if the mediator or escrow agent, and either party agrees the funds are released. If these conditions are not met, the funds can be returned. In crypto this is essential to marketplaces.

Savings Account

Cool feature. This locks funds into a contract, that when move takes 72 hours or 3 days to execute. That means at any time in that period you have the chance to reverse the withdrawal, and if you're hacked it will be a perpetual battle I suppose, but eventually you can ideally either exhaust the hacker and get your withdrawal or take other action, like making it public there is an issue and looking for consensus with witnesses. I'm not exactly sure the best solution in that case but your funds at least will be stuck and this psychologically tells hackers they should just give up on those type of accounts.

Revoking Voting Permissions

I suppose this is for someone who wants to make it clear they will not vote, and will be independent from the platform. This might be great for people close to the project, or those who don't vote regardless. I'm curious to see who uses this, but I suppose someone will.

Lower-level tech updates

Change of serialization of data will allow improvements for sub-chains and side-chains. This is great, because it allows developers to start and branch out in the future with their own parameters for their projects. This seems to be early steps, but a great vote of confidence for future use cases.

@null nullification

now for promotion account null is zeroed every block effectively burning or destroying the coins.

Conclusions

It sounds like the entire aim is to help ease the supply and improve the economic variables. Steemit.com says beta, but I think the biggest part is tweaking this economic experiment. We may all have to make sacrifices for the overall success of the market and platform, but that's what a strong community will accept with the draw backs if they are true believers of STEEM. I'm a bit frustrated, but then again I understand the macro-economic perspective, and that sometimes it takes data and time to get that to where it's most healthy. If they had more data when starting we probably would already be here.

-images creative commons/tradingview