HF20 Discounted Accounts are Steem’s Klondike

Those were a few wild days, to say the least.

Or maybe not so wild depending on how much, or little, SP you had and how well you excel at the virtue that is patience.

HF20 is rolled out, and after few patches, it seems everyone is now capable to interact with the blockchain, at vastly reduced cost. Pretty much like it was during the days, weeks, months, and year of HF19.

All is well in Steemland and a small bugfix patch for 0.20.4 was stealthily released and also adopted by many witnesses already.

We survived, you survived, the chain survived, and our cyber lives can continue. Until the next patch at least. Hopefully that also means that the largest exchanges which operate with wallets will soon update their nodes and replay the chain and return to operational status - which for most was suspended on September 17th, 2018.

We could call the HF20 release The Large Freeze, yet all is well and exciting times are upon us as we get to know all intricacies and details of HF20, complete with soon to come many recommendations about optimal upvoting time, weight for curation maximizing, and... the usual in Steemland pretty much.

White Pass train in Skagway, Yukon, station by Boris Kasimov on Flickr

In recent years the Klondike area, in the Yukon province (Canada), has regularly hit the international news because of things found in its permafrost layer. Klondike is mostly known for its vast reserves of gold which triggered the Klondike gold rush end 19th century though. But because of the permafrost in the region, gold mining in the Klondike area wasn’t as simple as in other famous gold rush locations.

The area continues to be mined until this day, and little more than a decade ago people could even purchase a stake in an active Klondike mine by buying the book “The Good Life Gets Better”.

The mine is in the Klondike gold fields, just upstream from the mouth of the Klondike River's famous Bonanza Creek. The Klondike has yielded incredibly vast fortunes of gold since 1896 and is still doing so today. It is the site of the most frenzied gold rush in history and remains home to some of the richest gold-bearing gravel in the world.

HF20 Introduces Discounted Accounts

One of the major elements HF20 introduced, together with Resource Credits, are discounted accounts. These are accounts which can be claimed (against Resource Credits Mana) by Steemians.

As per Steemitblog:

The Velocity Hardfork will give users the ability to create new accounts at a discounted rate, potentially without having to pay any STEEM or delegate any Steem Power in order to create the account. When creating a new account, users will be able to use RCs instead of a portion (or all) of the STEEM account creation fee.

On a blockchain where until now most accounts were paid for, or sponsored by Steemians or via Steemit Inc, the new discounted rate for accounts is a massive asset. Especially, when considering that we are heading towards the SMT era and thanks to discounted accounts bApps - blockchain apps - will be able to signup more users, at a vastly cheaper cost than having to delegate minimum ~5SP for each new account.

The amount of discounted accounts created is set by the witnesses and the cost (in RC) is decided by the market.

When the available supply of discounted accounts is low and/or the demand for them is high, then the amount of RCs that will need to be used in place of the STEEM account creation fee will be high. When the available supply of discounted accounts is high and/or the demand for them is low, fewer RCs will be needed to replace the STEEM account creation fee.

This being Steem, whenever something is “free” it will be maximized. And so also happened to the discounted accounts so far as well, and few larger accounts have managed to claim many accounts tokens.

When looking at the distribution of the discounted accounts claimed so far, most accounts claimed have been claimed by operators of paid Account Creation services. The popular app @steemhunt also managed to get hold of several discounted account tokens. In their relentless pursuit of growth, and promotion of the app and thus also the Steem ecosystem, an own signup process will undoubtedly be rolled out on Steemhunt in a near future.

All well. Nothing wrong with it, the system works as expected.

While so far not many have claimed discounted account tokens, there is no doubt that when this post goes viral the SteemApps and community builders have recovered from the HF20 hangover, many more will every day be competing for those discounted account tokens.

It won’t be long before we see a “discounted account claim scrip”t on Utopian. Maybe @mahdiyari, the operator and developer of @steemauto, will even include an account claim option in Steemauto’s GUI.

That’s one of the beautiful elements of a thriving ecosystem like the one we live and love here on the Steem blockchain. Things happen and every option is used and eventually made available to anyone. Building apps, startups, and even coding has never been as democratized as it is nowadays and everyone benefits from that.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

And... discounted accounts on Steem are discounted accounts. They have both an actual cost (RC) and an actual value. Their cost being market driven, based on (limited) availability, will turn them in the next gold rush on Steem.

Much like Klondike.

Already has... but not yet everyone has recovered from the HF20 hangover and discovered Steem’s newest gold.