Why RC Increase Won't Help Newbies

It's Monday and a welcome new week.

A deeper look at some aspects of Resource Credits (RC)

So a few days ago I made this post, What's Wrong With Steemit?, and I made it because of 2 articles I had read, this post, Steem's Value vs Newbies's Resources Credits (RC), by @juanmolina which I got introduced to by @crypto.piotr, and this post, Is Steemit ready for mass adoption ?, by @moghul.

And I thought that I had addressed it enough in my post by concluding that RC limits could be a bit low, but that the biggest issue was the education and introduction of new users and the expectations they had coming in, and that those should be addressed by actually telling them that Steem and Steemit was not really a free platform even though they could create an account for free.

Read more about the reasons for that in my post, what I want to talk about here, is what I have read up on since then about how RC works, and why that means increasing RC won't help newbies.

So in order to better understand how it all works let's start with how RC is spent, and to do that this article, Calculating RC costs, by the Steem Developers have been a very big eye opener.

As that post describes, every transaction on the blockchain (posts/comments/upvotes/flags/transfers/etc) has a cost, and then there are a limited amount of resources available to complete that transaction, and as they decrease the cost in RC goes up and vice versa.

And those resources is the available computer power of the servers running the Steem blockchain, which is most likely paid in USD and not Steem (my guess).

Now after we know how RC is spent, and as the post also tells RC is allocated according to how much Steem Power (SP) the account have, and is spent on those transactions, plus regenerated over time, what covers the cost of running the servers?

Vested Steem as Steem Power (SP), is what covers the cost for those servers, and the resources to make the transactions on the blockchain, ergo the connection from SP to RC.

So what happens if we just raise the limits of RC?

Nothing, it will just inflate the value of available resources.

What happens if the price of Steem goes up?

Server resources will most likely be cheaper, and therefore more available resources, and newbies will get more transactions for their RC.

However spam will most likely also increase, since it's cheaper, so the help that gives to newbies will be limited.

Conclusion

So to conclude, what I said in my previous post still stands, with the exception of RC being too low.

RC is there to cover the cost of running the network, and to keep abusive behaviour such as spam out, and for the most part it works well enough for that.

And increasing the limits will not help newbies since it will just inflate the price af available resources, but higher Steem prices can help a bit.

What is actually needed is education, and the knowledge that it's not really free, it's not charity.

That's it for today.

Thank you for reading, follow and like if you do, and have a nice day.

Sincerely,
Erik Gustafsson