We've hit one million accounts! Whoop-dee-doo! I hate to rain on the parade. I know everyone likes to celebrate once and a while. However, I think we all need to step back and consider why we think 1M accounts is such a milestone.
This kind of thinking is a form of unit bias. It's the same reason why people are willing to buy a coin that's valued at less than a dollar instead of buying a fraction of a Bitcoin. For example, there are a lot of people out there that bought Ripple instead of Bitcoin because a Ripple costs $0.70 and a Bitcoin costs $8200. These numbers don't matter. All that matters is the market cap and where it's headed percentage wise. The reason Ripple and Bitcoin are so far apart is because Ripple has 39 billion coins and Bitcoin has 17 million coins in circulation. This number difference is totally arbitrary and doesn't matter.
Likewise, 1M Steem accounts means nothing when we have 60k active users. You won't see me celebrate 1000 followers due to the same logic. I got most of those from Steem Engine red fish. It looks like these people are upvoting me but I'm really just upvoting myself in a roundabout way. The way that Steem operates caused a bunch of worthless accounts to get created.
Every account gets a free half Steem coin and 15 delegation. When I created an account here 6 months ago the delegation value was 30 SP. That means we gave away half a million Steem coins plus all that delegation. This caused bot developers to exploit the system to create as many accounts as possible. I am not proud of these million accounts.
We need to end the mechanic of giving away free Steem to new accounts and end the delegation as well. This will automatically let everyone create an account instantly because Steemit will no longer have to vet accounts to determine if a bot dev is trying to exploit the system; they have no incentive to.
Delegating Bandwidth but not Steem Power.
In order to accomplish this we'll need to be able to delegate bandwidth separately from steem power. I think this is a good idea regardless of new account creation for various reasons. Being able to delegate bandwidth to the projects we support without losing voting power seems like pretty awesome functionality to me. This will be especially true when SMTs get released. It would also be easy to program I'm sure.
Steem is a great coin but we should all be aware of it's shortcomings and try to correct them. 1M accounts is currently more of a flaw than an accomplishment.