If you look at your Steemd account (steemd.com/@username) you will see something like this right below your reputation:
I took this screenshot while I was waiting as many of you were for the negative mana situation to be resolved.
The "RC Params" section has two groups of attributes right now: RC manabar and Max RC creation adjustment.
While I'm not sure yet what the second group of attributes stands for, RC manabar will most likely look prettier soonish, having already a clear name to describe what will its visual representation be in the future (it will look like the bandwidth bar now).
After the situation with negative mana will be resolved (probably already has been by the time I publish this post), here's how you can read the attributes from RC manabar, on Steemd, as far as I can understand things too, because I haven't been involved in writing the code:
- current_mana: the amount of mana you have right now
- last_update_time: for regular users it's probably uninteresting to know when was the last time their mana was updated, even if the information is not presented as a timestamp. So, I'm not going to insist on it.
- estimated_mana: the amount of mana it's estimated you'll have at the next update
- estimated_max: the amount of RC mana it's estimated you'll have when it will be at full capacity
- estimated_pct: how much mana you have represented as a percent (from 0 to 100%, once the negative mana issue has been resolved)
The current_mana, estimated_mana and estimated_max attributes are raw numbers, and usually very high integers. Normally regular users won't really care about these numbers, and they shouldn't.
The percent offered by estimated_pct will be more than enough, once people get used to the new RC system. And most likely, as I mentioned above, there will be a graphical representation for it, similar to bandwidth now and the voting power.
But right now it is a good idea to know how much various actions would cost in terms of RC mana. So I did some tests. This will fluctuate a lot until the RC system stabilizes in about a week. In fact they will fluctuate afterwards too, based on the load on the blockchain, on various types of resources. But it's good to know where we start off with the most common actions, so we don't spend too much unnecessary mana.
Here we go:
- voting: 2,797,370,941 RC
- one-word post: 11,045,554,432 RC
- one-word comment: 15,513,303,111 RC
- one-word reply to comment: 19,387,861,506 RC
- transacting STEEM: 2,463,671,443 RC
- power up: 2,508,183,314 RC
- claiming rewards: ? (didn't receive an error message with the needed RC, but it didn't work either)
- approving / disapproving witnesses: ? (same as above)
- LATER UPDATE: Anyone knows how much mana is a resteem? It slipped my mind to check it when I made my post, and it seems much harder to test now that everything works.
The above were tested on my main account. I tested voting on an alt account which only has Steemit's 15 SP delegation, and there are some differences, so don't take these values as exact for your account. Also from my remarks while testing, there seems to be a tendency that these costs go slightly lower in time (or it may be because the blockchain's resources are not used right now). For example, from the time I recorded the cost for voting till now, it has changed to 2,797,083,545 RC. That's almost 300,000 RC less.
One other remark: posts and comments will have different costs, depending how much resources are needed to process them. For example, images do need more resources to be processed.
If we disregard the exact numbers I came up with during the test, which may vary from account to account possibly, and in time, one thing is certain from those numbers.
Voting, transacting, powering up are considered cheap operations.
Creating a post starts right now at 11 billion RC for one word, but for one paragraph I would have needed 13 billion RC and for 600+ words, no images, 26+ billion RC.
One other remark is that replies are more expensive than comments which are more expensive than posts. Users who prefer engagement might have an issue understanding this ordering, unless explained, maybe with comparative examples on the impact on the blockchain resources. Keep in mind regular users are not developers, and should not be discouraged to interact, unless absolutely necessary!
What I would do until the RC system stabilizes?
I would
- post important stuff (from your perspective)
- stop spamming (well, I think I didn't until now either, but it was a hint)
- check on my RC mana regularly to see how various actions influence it
- temporarily disable following any curation trails
- temporarily disable or limit drastically auto-voting and vote-selling
- (later added) disable auto-claiming rewards?
- be scarce with RC for now, check what costs how much and prioritize your critical actions on the blockchain first
By the time the RC system stabilizes, all of us will know more, and you'll know better what to do with your RC mana then.
Stay informed!