RE: August and September '18 New STEEM User Report
We probably also need some sort of means of determining when/how/if newly created accounts are being powered up by having SP transferred to them after creation. In fact, it might be procedurally more accurate to note that there are two ways of creating accounts, using an account token or burning some amount of STEEM (currently 0.1), but in both cases the account requires SP transferred to it to interact with the blockchain in any meaningful sense.
How many accounts are getting created but receiving no SP immediately after either via delegation or transfer? That's a key metric that we need to look at.
It's the loss of that initial staking that is going to be really brutal for digital applications looking to implement on the steem blockchain, for reasons that I have talked about in other threads and which @intrepidphotos state separately.
And we still don't really have a good idea of how many RC are going to be necessary to engage in "reasonable" activity in terms of engagement with other content on the blockchain.
If uncertainty is the bane of investment, and it certainly seems to be, hardfork 20 has the immediate side effect of making investment in the steem blockchain a shakier proposition rather than a foregone one. Tracking account creation is going to be part of how we determine if that is the truth.
(I have a personal theory that it's actually bot swarms that have the advantage in the face of the requirement for the account creator to delegate or gift SP to an account before it can function. Digital applications aren't usually sitting on that much infrastructure funding that they can basically hand over for a return rate of less than 25% on just account creation. But bot farmers do, because they have the infrastructural support to distribute SP to new accounts intended to return a predictable amount based on their activity. Bot swarms have the greatest motivation to get their hands on the greatest number of account creation tokens and are already sitting on a fair amount of resources in order to do so because they require those resources to do what they're already doing. Again, looking at the pattern of account creation and SP delegation/gifting should allow us to at least formulate some sort of idea about whether that is an accurate prediction or fatalist.)
As we all know, not everyone has the ability yet to get account creation tokens because there is no easy to use UI for doing so. IMO that means the same people will be setting up accounts that were doing so before and look where that has got us. We need time for this system to mature.
"How many accounts are getting created but receiving no SP immediately after either via delegation or transfer? That's a key metric that we need to look at."
I will add this to next months report
According to @holger80 's numbers through beempy, not only have ACTs been acquired, there was a veritable gold rush on them not long ago. Not only that, but he posted how to claim such accounts through Beem a couple of days ago as well.
So while the same people are setting of accounts that were doing so before, there are some additional players in the game – and that makes analysis more interesting whenever and wherever it happens.
Since account creation is literally just that now, if you really want to track who is actually making accounts, you're going to need to start looking at the dyad of two events – the actual creation of the account and the initial SP investment, and where those operations originate from.
This isn't an issue of system maturation, it's an issue of being able to actually watch its functioning as the major players redistribute how they do it.
For the cost of being able to interact on the blockchain for a few days, even I can create one account. Just. If I really tried. Maybe.
(Though I'll bet the market for ACTs has gone up a fair amount over a few days ago. In fact, I'll just check as of this very moment. All I have to do is go over to https://beempy.com and it looks like for the low, low price of 4816 giga-RC, I could claim an account. Okay, so at this point the maximum RC in my account is 1167, so even at maximum RC, I could fund 1/4 of an account. And the prices are bumping along just about how you would expect.)
If there was a time to start establishing protocols and tools to study what's actually going on, this would be the time to do it, before things get more complicated and people start finding new ways to obscure their interaction.
I suspect we're going to need it.
since I posted that I have seen a few ways now to get a hold of these account creation tokens and @abh12345 did a post on it I think yesterday. The 'grab' I was expecting to happen, this is steem after all