The budget on free/subsided accounts is currently about 14000K/day (0.5 accounts/block) of which maybe 5K-10K will be practically claimable. If steem/steemit claims them all using all of their SP/RCs then someone with 1/10000-1/5000 as much SP/RCs would be able to claim one such account per day (at the cost of exhausting their RC for the day; possible acceptable). That doesn't get down to minnows, but it does get down to a good number of (arguably) mortals. Possibly around 10K SP or so, as a rough number. Someone with around 2K SP could claim an account and exhaust 5 days of RC. In some cases, people may absolutely prefer to just pay the 3 STEEM.
These numbers may be change though. Nobody really knows at this point what the budget should be (or the per-account fee).
Are Resource Credits (RCs), transferable? Is that linked to the steem power or is it independent?
I think we are moving in that direction but we aren't there yet.
RCs can not be transferred. Delegation of SP does affect RCs on both accounts.
Yes, you have to imagine that if Steem went x100 the account creation fee would be drastically lowered.
This was always my disagreement with the 'logic' that "there isn't enough STEEM to create millions of accounts for onboarding". There is plenty (an unlimited quantity in fact) as long as the price of STEEM goes up (and therefore the account fee down) along with the onboarding process. If it doesn't, something has gone very wrong.
Exactly. It'll be an unsustainable system if there were 100 million users, yet were the market cap <$1 billion.
This seems like a selfish move by Steemit Inc. to retain holdings, which is in direct contradiction to their stated goals of decentralizing their stake. That was early 2017, absolutely no steps have been taken since. That said, this could be useful to third party developers with a sweeping marketing plan. Even so, the concern is no one can compete with Steemit Inc in the subsidy market, due to their overwhelming RC budget.
If steem goes to $1000 someday, will we get more decimal places? Or will the smallest unit of measurement still be 0.001 and be worth $1?
It wouldn't necessarily be easy (sort of a Y2K-type problem with all the UI and other code that would need to be updated) but in theory the decimal place can definitely be moved. This was done with VESTS in the early days (multiplied by one million), although of course at that time there was hardly any software to update.
Well, good. It's almost a problem when steem hits $10, even. I mean I guess no one's complaining that their penny can't pay out... But also maybe they are?
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Total agreement, @smooth. I Noticed the same thing after a few seconds looking at account creation faucets and I am glad to see RC taking over, making something like 5.1 Million accounts annually with your calculations.
We might have to UP those numbers again, just calculated that with 14K accounts per day will take 196 years to get to 1 billion accounts.
Great breakdown -- thanks for that. I've been wondering what the RC costs of account creation are.
The equilibrium is still being reached (the cost to claim accounts is falling rapidly, I suspect because hardly anyone is claiming them at all yet) but the above is a ballpark estimate of what it will look like once that happens, with the current parameters and with the assumptions stated.
Interesting -- I was wondering about that. I suppose it'll probably fluctuate pretty wildly from time to time.
I'm planning to take a peek at the beem library in the next couple of days and see if I can't wrap my head around the account claim process. I keep talking to some co-workers about the dApp I'm working on, and I'm almost ready to start trying to on-board people (people that have previously tried to get through the 7-day wait at the Steemit sign-up process, and have either been forgotten, or forgot about it themselves).