There are many issues with Steemit scalability in HF20 'Velocity'

I recently read an article by @aggroed 'Thoughts on HF 20 "Velocity"- Yes to tokens, but no to mining.' in which he brought up some very good points about the direction we should consider heading in the next hard fork of Steemit.

The first point he makes is that the current signup process for Steemit is hopelessly broken. This is a statement I firmly agree with as well.

HF20 will come eventually and with it the need for a new way to onboard people into steemit. The standard faucet hasn't been a great solution as several have taken advantage of it. There may be some 40,000 accounts that existed simply to drain 6 steem each from the opening. In order to combat that in the short run wait times have been increased and onboarding people may take as long as two weeks and still costs steem. It's less than ideal.

Now that more people know about Steemit and know how to game the system, it's essentially on its way to being completely broken unless a solution is implemented.

Steemit is loosing Steem with each new account and its an unsustainable trend.

How to bring scalability to Steemit in an efficient and logical way?

Steemit has plans to introduce a new 'token' that will resolve the lack of scalability in this current new account signup problem.

The tokens will be used to create new accounts. The reason why tokens are necessary is that reaching their current milestone goal of 100 million people will not be possible unless they use a new tokenized system because the alternative is giving out hundreds of millions of Steem.

Why can't we just give new users Steem?

The answer to this question lies in the quantity that was created initially. At the present moment only two hundred and fifty million Steem exist.

The current proposal is to create the new STEEMIT TOKENS through mining. I strongly agree with @aggroed that this is a bad move

The approach they envision now to generate and distribute those tokens is through mining. That to me is a great travesty. While I myself mine and enjoy it quite a bit I'm not inclined to believe it is an approach that leads to equality and a healthy distribution of steem on the system. This is especially important on a platform already plagued by a terrible distribution.

What we need is equal distribution along the entire network, get everyone invested and exponential growth is certain!

Mining will add to the problem rather than reduce it so alternative options must be considered for the new tokens.

The justification for why mining will only make the future of Steemit dimmer is made in this point which makes a lot of sense.

If those that mine have the ability to make 6M steem and those that don't know can't mine then it creates an inherently dangerous situation for equality.

We need to appeal to Joe the Plumber and not just Linda the Linux admin. If you want to grow and you want to grow fairly then I don't like this aspect of the plan.

We need an alternative to mining that equally distributes the new 'SteemitTokens' in HF20.

This is the solution @aggroed has proposed and it sounds like a good one however we definitely need to get a big discussion going to get a consensus on a better alternative to mining.

Stake weighted voting a la Witness Voting.

Stake weighted voting is one of the greatest ideas that's come along in governance. It's far better to allow the community to decide where the tokens should go than to allow the limited few with mining competence to bear all the benefit. The chain and the witnesses can tweak how many new tokens need to be created to have a healthy supply, and a new group of token generators can be voted on to decide who will receive the tokens. I imagine a system where some 1000 or even more people could be voted in and earning a stake weighted proportion of fungible new account tokens.

This sounds like a much better alternative to mining. Remember the goal is to create a fair and equal distribution and make sure tokens arrive in the accounts of normal (non-tech savvy) people who know lots of other normal people and we can turn Steemit from a crypto social network into the everyday person's social network.

Let's get proposals written by tech savvy progressive programmers to give to the developers of Steemit before its too late and make sure HF20 does what we want it to do. We must encourage mass adoption of Steemit and continue the social networking revolution.

Please leave your thoughts and comments below!

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Sources:

@aggroed 'Thoughts on HF 20 "Velocity"- Yes to tokens, but no to mining.'