Hard Fork 20 has finished and we've got Resource Credits!
What are we supposed to do now?
The Steemit blog wrote a great post about moving forward as a community and iterating on the best way to allocate Resource Credits. I suggest you head over and read the whole thing, if you haven't, but I thought I'd take a crack at discussing how I think we can work to best allocate Resource Credits.
I'd love to hear your feedback: either below, or in my new Steemmaker Discord channel. This is a public Discord for my readers, and I'm even going to experiment with opening the voice channel for live streams on Vimm.
Why Resource Credits?
Balancing Resource Credit usage and rewards is going to be the big discussion in the next few months, as Steemians debate the best way to make Steem great.
Resource Credits help quantify the limits of the Steem blockchain: there are a finite amount of witnesses, with a finite amount of information that can be stored on each 3 second block. Resource Credits reduce spam by imposing a non zero cost to every transaction. The question going forward is how to do this best: which transactions should we penalize (charging more in RCs), and which should we encourage (charge less in RCs)?
The answers will have profound effects on the Steem experience. This is one reason I started my Discord channel. If you want to have a conversation, bring it to Discord, and hold onto your RCs for other posts. At the same time, if you don't like Discord, you can still comment below on Steem and I'll happily answer there.
The days of fifteen back and forth comments with 
Expensive RC Uses
Currently, it seems as though comments are the most resource intensive action on the blockchain. Low Steem Power accounts, such as the one pictured, show enough RCs for 18 comments or over 100 votes/transfers/power ups.
"Comments" includes posts, but does not seem to take into account the size of the post. A short, one sentence post seems to cost the same amount in RCs as a post with pictures and many paragraphs of text. (1.5 billion RCs)
Bargain RC Uses
On the other hand, votes, powerups, and transfers-which account for a great deal of the spam on Steem-cost only 259 million RCs. Transfers also cost .001 Steem at a minimum.
Spamming via "wallet mail" is currently cheap! It does cost more than it did before RCs, but not by much.
Bringing Balance to Steem
It's scary to make protocol changes, as everyone witnessed last week. If you screw up, it can have big consequences. Nevertheless, here are the changes I'd propose we look at, then implement, one at a time, to promote smart management of RCs and maximizing the Steem experience.
- Increase the minimum Steem for a transfer to 0.01. If we're really fancy, give users a slider they can use to adjust their own wallet inbox, so they only see transfers above a certain level. This could even be done as a UI level fix, (ahem
) showing only whitelisted accounts' transactions and those that pay a certain amount for the privilege of being seen by the owner.
- We could also increase the RCs for minimum Steem transfers (ie any .001 Steem transfer costs a significantly higher amount of RCs)
- Increase the RC cost of early votes for a post. This might be a bad idea, but I think the incentive to vote before others (due to curation rewards) is high enough to make it worthwhile. RC costs of older posts (maybe beyond a day or two) would be minimized, encouraging upvoting of new(ish) content without as much penalty.
- Match RC costs for comments and posts to the actual cost for the blockchain. This is where I'm unsure of the costs-maybe
can help me out-if longer posts with lots of graphics cause more work for witness servers or not.
Some Final Thoughts
Steem will win if people want to access the content, whether it is through Steepshot, Appics, Steemhunt, dtube, or any other dApp that runs on Steem. So while we're working through the best solution for RCs, we need to keep cranking out great content that brings people to this site and gives them reasons to join.Apps can and should be created with incentives to get people to create accounts and start earning SMTs to explore all the content there is to offer. If possible, I'd like to have some articles posted that require an upvote before they can be read, or a small tip given. This is something a good UI could do without a protocol level change.
Fine tuning RCs is an incredibly important part of making the Steem "freemium" model a successful one.
What are your thoughts? I'd love to hear what you have to say. Join the conversation below in the comments, or jump into my Discord channel and we'll chat there.
-Jeff
PS: Learn more about how to grow your Steem by reading my 5 Proven Steem Hacks...click the yellow banner below!
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://steemmaker.com/resource-credits-scarcity-on-steem/