This may be a boring topic for some, but it is an important discussion to have..
Account Creation Fee
With the current median account creation fee of 0.2 STEEM, it costs 6 STEEM or .2 STEEM + 29 delegated SP to create a new account. Many users who use services like AnonSteem and SteemConnect to create new accounts, pay the 6 STEEM. (This STEEM turns into SP in the new account.)
Bandwidth
The blockchain requires users have a certain amount of SP in order to perform operations such as posting, commenting, voting, and transfers. The more SP you have, the more operations you are allowed to do.
New Account Bandwidth
When new accounts are setup, it is important for them to have enough SP to do basic interactions with the blockchain. Previous analysis found the minimum amount was around 5-6 SP.
The Problem
With increased traffic recently though, it looks like 5-6 SP is no longer enough. Many users are reporting that they are unable to vote/post/comment as much as they like, because the blockchain is saying they have exceeded their allowed bandwidth. It seems users who are relatively active need closer to 10-12 in order to not have some of their operations blocked.
The Trade-Off
With the increase in user activity, there is an increase in bandwidth usage. With the increase in the price of STEEM, the cost to create accounts is going up. There is a trade-off between making the accounts cheaper, and providing them with more bandwidth.
Potential Solutions:
- Keep the current account creation fee and bandwidth limitations in place. New users will be able to perform some operations on the blockchain, but they will not be able to do as much posting, commenting, voting, etc. as 'full' users until they earn (or buy) more SP.
- Increase the account creation fee, to give the users more SP when they start. This also makes creating accounts more expensive.
- Increase the amount of bandwidth that users are allowed, by increasing the witness "Max Block Size" parameter.
Max Block Size
Currently all of the witnesses have this set to 65536. If at least half of the top witnesses were to double this, that would double the amount of bandwidth that users are allowed to use for the same amount of SP. I talked to @roadscape (one of the Steemit devs) and he said that the impact on witness/seed/API nodes should be minimal, since the current block size is small.
Discussion
I will admit, the max block size parameter is an area of the system that I am not fully familiar with. To me it seems like a good idea for everyone to increase this, but I don't want to do it without discussing it first. What are everyone's thoughts?
Reminder to vote for witnesses!
The Steem witnesses are the elected leaders of the community that power the blockchain. Everybody should learn about the Steem witnesses and vote on who they think is best. If you don't know much about witnesses or aren't sure who to vote for, you can check out this Witness Voting Guide. If you think @timcliff is doing a great job, please consider voting for him as witness! You can vote for witnesses here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses