You should guard your block producing keys like your balance keys. It is no different than someone having their bitcoin wallet key compromised and allowing the attacker to drain your account.

This is how we prevent the nothing-at-stake attack and the "produce on multiple forks" attack.   

99 - 106 is common recently.    105 at the time of this posting.

Automated deposit and withdraw is not fully operational.  It could be a week until it is properly automated. Things are still in the testing phase so expect delays until it comes online.

It won't hurt your efficiency at all.

For your hash rate, at least 2 maybe 3.  Just make sure all of your miners are not in the queue at the same time or you will idle.

A more accurate measure of TOTAL POW effort would be "num_pow_witnesses" which is about 105 (near all time high).

total_pow = sum of num_pow_witnesses over all blocks, a blockchain with the most total_pow has the highest average difficulty, while the one with the highest num_pow_witnesses has the highest current difficulty.

The other number to look at is head_block_number, the chain with the most blocks has had the least missed blocks and therefore is the one the majority of miners are building on.

A fork was created by some miners, but the real chain is:


You can get this information in the cli_wallet using the 'info' command.  

You are probably on a fork if you do not see your hashrate update every 3 seconds.

These are the active miners, 100% of the miners scheduled have been producing on the main chain.


We are investigating what caused some miners to get lost, but it appears that most are are the proper chain based upon the POW difficulty.

The dynamics of this number is as follows:  

new VESTS can always be created by converting STEEM to VESTS at the current VESTING_FUND_STEEM to TOTAL_VESTING_SHARES ratio.

New STEEM is constantly being created; therefore we know that total possible VESTS must also grow
New STEEM is constantly being added to VESTING_FUND_STEEM at a rate 9x faster than it is being created outside the fund; therefore, the conversion rate from STEEM to VESTS is constantly falling.

We can expect the rate of VESTS creation to fall while the rate of STEEM creation is constant in absolute terms.

Eventually (about 1 year) STEEM will switch from being created at a fixed rate and start being created at a fixed APR. At this point in time the rate at which VESTS grows will level off.

The critical thing to remember is that growing of the number of VESTS never reduces the number of STEEM per VESTS.  

VESTS are diluted in percentage terms any time more than 90% of STEEM is held as vests.  

At the moment we have the following: 7652767.495/8477724.000:  0.902691276

This means that over 90% of all STEEM has been converted to vests. Most of the STEEM that hasn't been converted to VESTS is held in the REWARD FUND (786706.000) (9.27%) which leaves just 0.47% of STEEM liquid in people's accounts.

On July 4th, the REWARD fund will be distributed by the protocol, 50% VESTS and 50% SBD.  Assuming things don't change much between now and then, 95% of STEEM will be held in VESTS and 5% will be held in SBD (STEEM Backed Dollars).

The incentive to hold VESTS will fall dramatically over the next few weeks as the rate of change in the supply of STEEM falls.

I just checked into the mining difficulty and am happy to see that it is now back to where it was when we were mining full STEEM ahead. The queue length is fluctuating between 100 and 104

Here is the current miner queue. It looks like there are a couple major miners (tombstone, aka puppies).  Glad to see a  variety of people mining this.

[
  "tombstone30",
  "tombstone86",
  "nextgencrypto101",
  "ani625",
  "dele-puppy",
  "tombstone48",
  "fortunescape",
  "tombstone67",
  "hsbc",
  "tombstone70",
  "btstools8",
  "disney",
  "justin",
  "diaphanous",
  "fantasy",
  "hephaestus",
  "sexvideo",
  "citibank",
  "tombstone96",
  "books",
  "klm",
  "enki5",
  "tombstone50",
  "drunchpunk4",
  "simpson",
  "hr301",
  "fury",
  "blackjack-1",
  "tombstone26",
  "summon",
  "enki3",
  "gil",
  "soupper30",
  "hr101",
  "tombstone53",
  "tombstone35",
  "silver1",
  "tombstone60",
  "softbank",
  "anna",
  "btstools2",
  "tombstone36",
  "kitten",
  "soupper5",
  "tombstone49",
  "princess",
  "tombstone20",
  "try2",
  "soupper31",
  "coldstorage16",
  "cyrano",
  "abderus",
  "delegate.lafona",
  "hr302",
  "tombstone51",
  "bunkermining",
  "tombstone37",
  "try3",
  "wayfairer2",
  "butterfly",
  "soupper43",
  "enki40",
  "commedy",
  "admin",
  "theoretical",
  "soupper39",
  "soupper25",
  "tombstone52",
  "firesidechat",
  "tombstone22",
  "ihash",
  "soupper12",
  "nnnn",
  "expir4",
  "jigglypuff",
  "brianna",
  "tombstone54",
  "soupper32",
  "steempty",
  "nnnn2",
  "juna",
  "hr303",
  "coldstorage13",
  "coldstorage14",
  "americanpegasus",
  "troglodactyl",
  "tombstone80",
  "tombstone71",
  "try",
  "tombstone46",
  "tim4",
  "dark",
  "elixir",
  "aquarius.com",
  "anonymous",
  "galaxy",
  "soupper36",
  "wackou2",
  "tombstone90",
  "hr304",
  "chatterbox",
  "dantheman"
]

So here is something that is on topic, not abusive, and yet gets deleted by a forum moderator?   What am I missing?

This is how much STEEM you would have if your could instantly convert your VESTS back to STEEM. It will only ever increase.

    yoursteem = total_vesting_fund_steem * your_vesting_shares / total_vesting_shares

This is how you calculate the percent of STEEM held by the VESTING account:

  total_vesting_fund_steem /  current_supply   ==  87.3%

This is how you calculate the liquid STEEM held in user accounts:

    current_supply - total_reward_fund_steem - total_vesting_fund_steem
    5522844 -   4826044  - 638980  =  57,820  = 1%
      
On July 4th, 2016 the total_reward_fund_steem will be converted into SBD and VESTS and distributed to user accounts.

The conclusion we can draw from this is that the amount of STEEM that is able to hit exchanges any time soon very small.

The easiest way to visualize how the blockchain maintains equilibrium between liquid STEEM and VESTS is to imagine two glasses of water with a constant flow of new water into each glass in a 9:1 ratio. If you let the water run for long enough it will re-balance the ratio of water in two glasses to about 9:1 regardless of the initial ratio.

How long it takes to balance depends upon the initial quantity of water, the initial ratio, and the rate of flow.

If you start out with a 1M : 9M ratio and add water in at a rate of 9:1 per second then after 11.5 days you will reach a 10M : 10M ratio. After another 11.5 days you will reach a 19M : 11M ratio.  

The long-term rate of flow is to grow the supply by 113% per year.  Most of this will flow to VESTS which means that most of the "inflation" is more of a stock-split than true inflation. This means that 90% of all inflation does not reallocate wealth. Which leaves us with a mere 10% of inflation resulting in redistribution of ownership.

Steem will soon be available on BitShares in this market.

https://bitshares.openledger.info/#/market/OPEN.BTC_OPEN.STEEM

This exchange pair is brought to you by Open Ledger  (aka. CCEDK). 

If you want to trade for FIAT you can also trade this pair:

https://bitshares.openledger.info/#/market/OPEN.USD_OPEN.STEEM

You can place bids in these markets while we wait for Open Ledger to enable STEEM deposits / withdraws. 

You are correct.  It will not go above 90% unless people with STEEM explicitly convert to VESTS.  Absent any transactions the amount of STEEM held in VESTS will always move TOWARD 90%

Bubba, thanks for providing a positive contribution. I would kindly suggest that you rectify your standing in the Steem community by removing your earlier posts.

We would like to cultivate a positive, encouraging, and honest community that is welcoming to all.

Keep in mind when you are pricing STEEM that the supply will reach ~500M within a year.  If you convert to VESTS then you can consider the current supply and more-or-less lock in your percentage.

Just trying to help everyone know what to expect when they buy/sell. 

I can honestly say that the decision to relaunch had nothing to do with how much anyone had mined and everything to do with a fundamental bug in the scheduling algorithm that lead to undefined scheduling behavior. This undefined behavior affected everyone and coordinating a hard fork in a timely manner was much more expensive.

I can confirm that steem is Ned Scott.

Network admin experience sounds like the right skill set for this.  I'll vote for steempty.

Because the network uses approval voting, we can vote for more than 19  witnesses and let everyone else decide which of our nominees actually are selected.

Our influence over the network will decrease over time, but during the bootstrap phase it beneficial.  

  

We would have preferred the premine + ICO route.  It would have been cleaner, lower risk (in terms of getting desired stake), etc.  Then we talked to lawyers and read the regulations and saw how Ripple was prosecuted.

Conclusion: premine + ICO could force us to register as MSB and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Furthermore, it would undermine the real use case for Steem.  ICO also carries
the risk of SEC violations.  I am not saying that a premine + ICO couldn't be done legally without becoming a MSB or violating SEC, I am merely stating that it is more challenging / risky.

Meanwhile Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and other mined coins appear to be accepted and explicitly accounted for in the regulations.  

When it comes to the law and regulations, how you do something is often more important than the result achieved.

So we released a coin with open code that fully documents the protocol for anyone willing to work for it and didn't mine anything before all information about the protocol was technically available to the public. In theory,
anyone could see the protocol and realize the new business opportunities it creates. There is no "insider" information when the protocol is open and anyone can build on it.  

Our only advantage is *information* about how we intend to use the platform. The irony is that there are legal risks in sharing information about what we intend to do for a
coin until after we have done it. That information could be interpreted as a promise that in turn would give the coin value derived from our future actions.  So we didn't promise anything, but we still
know what our plans are. End result, we valued the coin higher than anyone else.  We purchased it with our own miners. Speculators willing to take a risk competed with us even though they didn't
know exactly what we planned to do with the coin.

We also have learned from past experiences like ProtoShares that was used to launch BitShares. Invictus had intended to mine it and make money on the appreciation after BitShares
actually came out, but instead GPU miners and faster mining algorithms were developed within a week of launch. That left the BitShares team struggling for a solution. It is reasonable to
expect that anyone with a profiler and some programming skills could come up with a faster, more efficient, implementation of mining that we did. Higher performance could have been achieved
with just a hour of effort by a competent programmer.  

So, if you are OK with the concept of premine + ICO, and if you value having a development team funded by capital appreciation, and if you value having a team do the best it
can to insulate itself for burdensome regulations, then you can appreciate what was done with STEEM.  If you don't like 'games' then blame the government for their rules, don't blame the people who play by them.

Discussions are underway with two exchanges, on of which has committed to adding it and the other is investigating it.

NextGen, Steemd, if you would like to be a witness I will vote for your continued efforts if you would be willing to reveal a bit about yourself and are interested in a long-term job running a node.

If you are interested in becoming a witness please share with everyone a little about yourself.  There are 19 slots available.