Here's the real question that needs to be answered:
How much will it cost in order to create an account which can make three posts a day and 15 comments?
I would be willing to negotiate on whether that is a "reasonable" amount to expect a new user to engage on a social network with, but it's the beginning of a discussion.
The problem is that nobody can answer that question. Not that nobody will answer that question, but that nobody can. Not even Steem Inc. can answer that question, because they clearly had no idea of what "intended use" was when they started setting up the RC system, haven't been able to communicate what their targets are, and the witnesses don't seem to be terribly interested in telling us what they think the standard use case should be/is. And that's a problem.
At this point, with the current tuning of the system, we might could generate some sort of approximation – but that information might be invalid tomorrow. @holger80 has been doing some incredibly good work with charting RC costs for various operations on the blockchain and I've been following it fairly closely, but I still don't think I can answer the question above.
What we need is some sort of stability introduced to the marketplace based on a clear idea of what the demand is, what the historical demand has been, and what the witnesses and Steemit Inc. want the delivery to be. That we just don't have.
Obviously it will cost more than 3 STEEM to create and power up an account to a level that enables basic interaction on the steem blockchain sufficient to engage enough in order to continue making enough operational income to get ahead at all. Until that number is well-defined, you would have to be a terrible fool to be onboarded users for your digital app only to not have them have enough RC to do anything with that application going forward, and as a developer you can't know how much you're going to have to invest in every single user that's on board.
That is not a situation where a savvy developer wants to get caught out.
Post and comments are essentially the same so this is 18 posts+comments and answer to this (given the current state of the RC system; these numbers may change but probably not by a huge amount absent some design changes) is about 10-15 SP. It can be actual SP in the account or delegation.
Except that's not the whole answer, because on top of the basic charge for simply doing the post transaction, there is an additional charge on a per byte basis which increases the overall cost. What is "the target post/comment size?"
We don't know. And just as importantly, we don't know what it will be tomorrow because one of the major witness values is not only what the transaction cost is but what the per byte cost is.
Given the current state of the RC system, these numbers are probably going to change pretty drastically because the current state is definitely not what was intended and what is intended. If nothing else, the 1/10 cost declaration from the witnesses is very likely to slide up over the next month or two. At the very least.
I suspect that you probably can't get along with less than 20 to 25 SP at the current settings and I have no idea how high that's going to go up to in the future, because no one with the power to make that decision has had a conversation of where they want to see it go.
Doubt and instability are not good for encouraging investment, whether it be financial or personal interest.
It is close. My estimates were for a 'moderate' size post or comment of 1-2 KB. For larger or smaller the numbers will vary. The per byte charge is pretty low and dropping, so the effect of size is becoming smaller.
These aren't currently adjustable by witnesses. The rules are fixed (absent a software upgrade), although the prices are determined by market/usage conditions so in that sense you can't know in advance, only estimate. C'est la vie.
The pool formulas have a half life of a week, and they were pre-filled to 90%. As such it won't take that long. There is still some adjustment going on as things balance out but it isn't enormous. When the 1/10 as applied there was an immediate dramatic effect (15 SP accounts were limited to 1-2 comments previously). There will be further adjustment to equilibrium but only around the edges. For now it looks like the most significant change will be a smaller cost per-byte, reducing the importance of post or comment size.
It clearly depends on what you are trying to do. The same numbers won't work for everyone. (Also some differences for different apps.)
very well said
Obviously it will cost more than 3 STEEM to create and power up an account to a level that enables basic interaction on the steem blockchain sufficient to engage enough in order to continue making enough operational income to get ahead at all. Until that number is well-defined, you would have to be a terrible fool to be onboarded users for your digital app only to not have them have enough RC to do anything with that application going forward, and as a developer you can't know how much you're going to have to invest in every single user that's on board.
based on looking around at varying account's RC and their abilities (and seeing who is complaining about not being able to do anything and who isn't hehe)- it seems like 50 SP and above is really not having a hard time at all.
between 30-50 may be a sweet spot.
But let's think about what that actually means.
Because of the current trading level, that means that a digital application going to on board a new user who wants to interact with a reasonable frequency on the blockchain is going to cost at least $33 US if we go with your lowest estimate.
There isn't a digital application on earth that can afford to burn $3 and give $30 to every single new user. It is simply unsustainable. That's the problem.
There isn't a blogging or microblogging platform on the entire Internet that can afford to give away $33 per user, because there isn't a blogging or microblogging platform on the Internet that makes $33 per user for every user that signs up, including the ones who don't ever use the service again after signing on. If you were to assume that you're going to charge the user $30 for the pleasure of using your platform, you have to compete with every other blogging platform, video platform, or whatnot available which they can use for cheaper.
None of these solutions are a recipe for success, and requiring that a platform take at the very minimum a $3 US loss per user, assuming that they simply delegate SP to the user until they're able to pay it back or through some other mechanism, is a death sentence.
Anybody that spent five minutes thinking about it knows that it's a death sentence.
If you're looking for the core problem of this whole architecture, right now, looking straight at it, that's the problem.
Thinking about in terms of what basically becomes a $30 user acquisition cost is grim enough, but it’s even worse when the fact is the system will run out of Steem!
If it truly takes 15-30 SP to have a minimum viable user experience, then the Steem blockchain currently caps out at 10-20 million users. And that’s only if everyone dumps their stake and we secure a totally equitable distribution of the ~300 million Steem in existence! In truth, under these SP needs, we’re probably capped at 2-4 million active users.
Whatever needs to happen on a technological level, the goal should be clear. If Steem ever wants to touch the user base numbers of Reddit, Instagram, FB, etc.; accounts need to have a passable user experience when holding 1 SP or less.
To do that, we'll need for the major stakeholders to decide, one way or another, if they want to be participating in a fintech crypto-commodity market or a functioning social network which uses a lightly distributed transaction ledger to keep score.
A crypto-commodity market can survive with the well under a million active users, even flourish. A social media system trying to compete with the network effects of Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter simply cannot.
The usual counterargument to this is that as the perceptual value of the social media network increases, the value of STEEM likewise increases and thus the user acquisition cost decreases proportionately. Which would be true – if growth was guaranteed. Unfortunately, the costs for developing digital applications on the steem blockchain are frontloaded and you need users now, not in five years. In five years if accounts were magically useful at 30 SP values, that might be a real cost of under a couple of cents per user. Perfectly bearable. But this is in five years of magical unicorn growth. It's now.
I'm not sure this is a problem that can ever be solved given this technology with a competitive edge. The underlying technology has costs and inefficiencies which are not actually being addressed by the RC system, only vaguely gestured at.
A more useful system would introduce a dynamic market which witnesses could set their own prices for transactions in based on their own network, storage, and CPU costs, with clients choosing who to do RC transactions with based on who is offering the best deal for a given commit time, but we'll never see that.
definitely true. that's certainly the problem.
i know in this post what stuck out to me most is that they're inquiring about subsidizing this problem. i agree it shouldn't be in the hands of the new dapps on the steem blockchain. previously within the old system with the original 15 SP allotment to new users, we didn't see this kind of low use threshold (and i know RC was created, in part, to allow for more accounts to be created than the previous 15 SP delegation, likely often from steemit itself, would have allowed for; scalability, as it says above^^) .. obviously the cost is more transparent now with RCs. who/what "ate up" (subsidized) the cost before if 15 SP could grant that much user activity? currently 15 SP isn't enough to grow an account.
I don't know the answers, but I am staying tuned to the conversation.
Oh, that I can tell you without hesitation – the original 15 SP came out of the vast, vast, vast (did I mention vast?) @steem SP wallet. They tapped 15 SP to be delegated to every new account creation and of the daily creation costs barely moved the needle on how much SP remained in the pool. Eventually, for established accounts they stopped delegating that initial 15 SP and it returned to their wallet.
Now, anyone can create accounts – but the SP also has to come out of their pocket. Which is fine and even reasonable, but along with this requirement has come the fact that the minimum viable SP for basic engagement on the platform has gone up so every digital application that wants to on board users needs to have at least as much SP investment as they would like to bring users on at a reasonable pace times 20 or 30 – and I hope that you didn't want to actually use any of that investment money for paying yourselves, paying for services, or in fact anything else, because you won't be able to. You'll need it as the cushion to onboard new users.
And unlike Steem Inc., you won't have a vast reservoir of "ninja mined" (a term which I think is unsuitable but which others seem to like quite a lot) SP to bring users on with. You are going to have to acquire that SP, probably by bringing in real fiat currency in exchange.
And that is going to suck if you were thinking of developing a digital application on the steem blockchain.
This is a bigger problem than it looks like, even if you assume that the minimum viable SP for an account is 5 to 10 rather than the more reasonable 20 to 30 it looks like right now. I can't think of many projects with enough SP and enough SP coming in per month per new user to be able to afford to deploy for any users who don't already have accounts on the steem blockchain.
Imagine you're in that position. What would you decide?
I really had problems with this for several days when the Steemit Inc. writers were first describing it. It seemed like they were making a strong argument that we don't actually have enough resources to make Steem work.
Then I realized that they were making an unfounded assumption that resources have to be distributed linearly by stake. They really don't; most of us with significant stake don't need all the RCs we've been assigned. Distributing RCs more generously at the low end of stake and less generously at the top would largely solve the interaction problems.