I agree with your sentiment here, but if Steem wants mass adoption, we still need to drive the base necessary SP for an acceptable user experience much lower.
Let's round up and say we have 300 million Steem in existence right now. That's 60 million accounts each with 5 Steem. So we're capped at 60 million users... already not a huge number compared to big networks. And that's if we go full Communist, and everyone gives up any stake they have above 5 SP. More accurately we'll probably follow a 80/20 distribution, meaning we have just 60 million Steem around for "average" accounts outside whales, businesses, etc. So we can expect maybe 12 million users who may not even have the option to power up because there's no more Steem to be had.
We need accounts with 1 SP or less to still be viable for truly mass adoption. I'm starting to think this may not be doable, and we may emerge into a model more of 0 SP users being subsidized by RCs shared or delegated by the platforms and apps they are interacting on.
That's probably true, if STEEM stays at the current value? Wouldn't a higher value mean accounts can be created and cover the costs of bandwidth with .1 STEEM, for instance? That higher valuation is what could cause such an influx of new users. They power up and that helps the value stay up.
I don't see any correlation between value and bandwidth/RCs/max transactions. If Steem goes to $10 USD tomorrow we don't have 10 times more infrastructure. That just means that instead of $5 getting you 5 SP worth of transaction ability, now it'll cost you $50 to get the same amount of transactions. Increased value means it actually costs more for a new account to purchase the ability to transact freely.
I'm honestly curious what it takes to increase resource capacity. Side chains? Require witnesses to run more powerful nodes? I just don't know the technicals. But the amount of SP needed to transact does not go down with a rise in Steem value.
Increased value will just be something that motivates users, but again, I'd contend that if successful, we're heading into an era of Steem scarcity most folks don't think about. For simplicity let's again say that we have 300 million Steem in existence and we're inflating 10% per year. (These numbers are both a bit high.) 30 million new Steem a year. If we get to just 10 million active users the average account earns 3 Steem a year. And that's an average. We all know accounts that will still be earning tens of thousands. So the median account, the average users and new signups, probably will earn less than 1 Steem a year.
If Steem is at $100, cool. Your average friend on FB or Instagram wouldn't mind having an extra $100 a year just for doing something they do anyway. And there'll be the "casino" effect where people know a post could go viral at any point and deliver them an effortless windfall. Or rather than the excitement of simply being re-tweeted once in your life by your favorite celebrity, maybe you get a massive upvote from them instead with real monetary value. It'll be a fun system. And folks will earn SMTs and complementary tokens, pay for subscriptions and merchandise with the businesses that release them, etc. But with large scale adoption earning any significant amount of Steem for an average user is a thing of the past. And if Steem Power is the only token giving access to blockchain resources, where does that leave new users?
Again, I was hoping to see this new system balance in a way that smartly eliminates spam and allocates transactions in a way that a 0 SP account with the base RC allotment is still fully functioning for average everyday purposes. I still think that can come to pass and it's what needs worked toward.
For some reason I thought this new system would keep the cost of account creation the same while the value fluctuates. What you speak of, I thought was the old model we just got rid of.
My vote was once worth $20. If these tokens shot up to $100, I can gaurantee I'd be putting a lot of smiles on faces, and they won't mind the fact they're receiving .01 STEEM or .001 STEEM. $20 is $20. There will still be a demand. People will want to work their way up to owning one whole STEEM, if that were the case.
If I’ve read everything correctly, currently creating an account still costs 3 Steem, which now is burned instead of powered up into the account. This then creates a minimum RC that the account has to transact with, currently 3,000 but being raised to 6M. Accounts can also be created by another account converting RCs into a “discounted account creation token.” So you burn a ton of RCs if you have them, and can create an account for “free.”
But the big question is what will these 0 SP minimum RC accounts be capable of? If they’ll only be able to post or vote a few times a week it’s a problem. If they still need to power up 5+ Steem to be viable participants, we’re facing the scalability and Steem scarcity issues I noted above.
0 SP minimum RC accounts need to have a similar experience to 15SP accounts prior to HF20. Steemit has been delegating 15 SP to new accounts precisely because it created a user experience that didn’t result in too many frustrating bandwidth errors under normal use. That concept of a minimum viable account still needs to hold true, again, for much less Steem.
I’d welcome any corrections on this from anyone reading if it’s misinformed!
Reading through what you're saying and combining it with my work your way up mentality leads me to one conclusion.
People will need to step up their curation game. We can't simply depend on a few tweaked parameters here and there and place the full burden on someone else. If all we have to do is push a simple button, but refuse, aren't we just as much at fault for keeping people down to the point where they can't interact with us?
What do people really want here, I wonder. When massive amounts of SP were being delegated away and centralized into a few hands, then offered back to the public for a fee, where were these complaints about how pay to play won't work then? Why is everyone suddenly so up in arms now...
I'm trailing off, signing off. It's time to think about things.
When there's still no incentive for curation. Yeah.
That losing attitude won't get people very far.
Two years ago, I started at the bottom, with nothing.
I've earned exactly 1072 SP through curating alone, in two years. I pressed that button 21007 times. I'm sure that helped a lot of people. Plenty of incentives.
There are incentives ;) 25% paisve reward for curation
and the fact you will make someone happy with that upvote, without costing you any money in charge
if people make them for a purpose they will be also delegating SP to them I would think. The spammers will not and phishing link folks just need new accounts to work with until flagged to 0.
Currently I'd estimate about 40% of STEEM is vested and voting; so there is still plenty of liquid STEEM available before it becomes a valuable scarcity.