How Much Resource Credits do you Need to Engage? Not as Much as you Think!

Since the Hard Fork, I have been closely monitoring the use of my Resource Credits. My focus on this new feature probably relates to the huge issues I as well as the community had after the Hard Fork to do anything other than browse on #STEEM given some bugs that took this new metric to negative figures. However, even after these bugs were fixed, the economy of resource credits became an interesting challenge as now actions had a direct cost to your stake. This has been mostly fixed but the costs continue to fluctuate. I have been watching these costs from the Beempy website (link below) which are updated by Hive account@holger80.

After most of the bugs where fixed, I have never had an issue with engaging in the platform despite me being quite active throughout a normal day. I would normally sit for an hour or two to catch up on my feed and write my posts these days. In addition, with the launch of Hive account@steemmonsters I have played well over two to three dozen games at a time which I feared would use up bandwidth given everything going on there. However, I have never seen my resource credit bandwidth go below 98% at any given time. I will admit that this is mainly a function of my stake and being a Dolphin does help enormously for me not having to be really concerned with this use of my Resource Credits.

Another feature from the Hard Fork was the ability to claim accounts which I previously discussed. While I still cannot say what I will do with these claimed accounts, I believe that having them can be a benefit as the ecosystem continues to expand and DApps become more engaging. I also hope we can interact and support more new users to foster improved retention around the community. After being able to successfully claim my first account shortly after the launch of the feature thanks to guidance from the community, the resource credit costs of doing this operation have increased substantially as seen below.

However, I was recently noticing how the costs of this function have been volatile but have provided an opportunity to being able to claim an additional account. However, the amount of resource credits needed to claim were very close to the total amount of my resource credits. If I was successful to execute the operation, I would be limited to less than 1% of my normal bandwidth. I quickly did some calculations to know how much I would need on reserve to make a post and at least 4-5 comments and votes.

Given that it was late at night, I thought I could take that risks as I have also notice that the resource credits recharge pretty quickly for me, again mostly given my stake in the protocol. I quickly ran the operation and to my pleasant surprise, it was executed! However, after refreshing my available resource credits from steemworld.org (thanks to Hive account@steemchiller for this great service; please support him and the development), I saw my bandwidth drop to 0.24%! However, given my stake this still represented over 21 billion in resource credits.

I was about to go to bed so I was not concerned of the limitations I would have on engaging with the platform. Despite this low amount, I was still able to post my daily Hive account@actifit post and provide an upvote and comment on another post before calling it a night! I think this demonstrates the importance of accumulating STEEM and powering it up. The advantage of having a great stake will ultimately provide flexibility and an extended reached to not only engage but to provide support to many communities seeking to add value to the ecosystem. Given the price of #STEEM and the amount of activity or lack thereof, there has never been a better opportunity to accumulate more since I have started here early this year. I intend to add as much as I can to avoid these "close calls” and to also continue claiming accounts for whatever potential they can bring in the future.