RE: My First Reaction To HardFork 20, "Velocity" - Proposing Mining via Proof of Burn and Proof of Transaction
Thanks for the overview of HF20 - I wasn't aware that the discussions about it were already taking place.
The subject of creating new accounts is a very interesting one, I see a couple of issues with the aforementioned propositions, that I would like to mention:
Bob wants t create an account on the Steemit website, but he doesn't have any Steem... So, he goes to an exchange and buys (with Bitcoin, Ether, etc)
I don't think that is is a good idea. The beauty of Steemit, as Dan has spoken about, is that people don't even need to know about Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Witnesses etc. to use it and enjoy it - the barrier to entry is incredibly low for a Blockchain product. We should not raise it
Also, the reason why modern Apps have switched to a "Freemium" model is exactly for the reason that they want to remove barriers to entry - letting users try before they buy / purchase in game expansions.
The other points that I would like to mention are around "how to you scale up the on-boarding processes in a way that is resistant to abuse?"
Presently, it seems like there is a manual process where accounts are vetted before they are created (for the good reason that it costs resources to fund a new account), but this is bad for two reasons
- it doesn't scale very well
- it adds in centralisation / censorship
If we add in a mining or token-based approach how to we prevent an attack from someone with a lot of resources or who is spamming the system with requests?
Thanks for sharing, I'll have to check out the post that you linked to.
I don't know where Dan said that, but his articles were certainly not for beginners, lol. The structure works without the need to have too much knowledge, but it's the people with a bit of knowledge who are trying to get advantage by creating multiple accounts to get free STEEM. This is a much bigger problem than it seems. If somebody creates 10,000 accounts and it gets $5 worth of STEEM for each of them and then dumps $50,000 in an exchange, that will drag the price of STEEM down. So it's everybody's concern.
I totally agree. It's definitely not a trivial problem to solve.
A blockchain is different playfield. The fee has to be somewhere, otherwise people will abuse the system.
Steem prevents abuse with rate-limiting how many transactions users can make in a period of time. Other blockchains use transaction fees. For a social media platform, Steem's model is superior because it allows posting and voting for free.
But the fee has to be somewhere, in Steem's case it's in the account creation. When the account is created, it will get some SP which is needed to use the blockchain. So if you want to use freemium model, you have to find a way to raise money for account creation.