Something BIG is "cooking" for the bandwidth!

^Source

If you follow the posts of Steemit blockchain team, you know bandwidth system will go through radical changes soon.

Right now, the bandwidth tells us an amount of bytes one has at disposal for any transactions of the account on the blockchain, regardless of the transaction type (if they send Steem/SBD to another account, power up, post, vote etc.).

Going forward, after the changes to the bandwidth system, there will be a cost associated with each transaction, and that cost will be denominated in Resource Credits (RCs), not in bytes. These costs will take into consideration much more than the amount of space the transaction needs on the blockchain, it will also encompass six different factors, and to quote from @steemitblog, they are:

Blockchain history size
Reindex time
State file size
Memory usage
Disk iops
Network bandwidth

Maybe you are not interested in knowing exactly what these factors are. That's ok. It's enough to understand that after the new bandwidth system will be released, the impact of everyone's actions on the blockchain will be much better quantified and you'll be made aware of the costs of your actions. The costs will also fluctuate depending on the load of the network on its various resource types.

The Steemit blockchain team hinted on the possibility of gamifying the hole process in one of their previous articles. Here's the full section, there are only two paragraphs:

An added benefit of the new system is that it will further gamify the Steem experience. When a user can know how many RCs they will have, how long it takes for those RCs to recharge, and how many RCs each transaction will cost, they will be able to make informed decisions about how to spend their RCs.

While a primary objective for Steem is to minimize the cognitive load on users, this system will create new opportunities for developers looking to create more engaging applications. Developers will be able to provide interfaces that encourage their users to think tactically about how best to use their limited resources, because more granular data about resource consumption by individual users will be readily available. In addition, those users who may be inclined to over-consume blockchain resources (i.e. spammers) will be discouraged from doing so, as they will be shown very clearly just how much of their limited resources their efforts are consuming.

Even at this point I felt there might be something more coming, because they focused on creating a special token for the bandwidth (not in the sense of a blockchain token), which is spendable (and rechargeable!).

So, here comes a teaser from @ned:
#bandwidth-delegation-pools

Pretty cryptic, yeah, but the word delegation kinda stands out, doesn't it? ;)