So as of right now there is no price assigned to usernames for EOS. I think this is going to prove to be a little bit of a problem because as we saw with STEEM pretty much someone ran a script pretty early on and snagged a ton of one word usernames like @apple @google @amazon .....etc. Essentially squatting on account names. Going a step further check out if any username is available for any of the planets in this solar system or any of the moons in this solar system. I have checked them all and they are all taken except @io but the reason it isn't taken is because the username has to be at least 3 characters. That would have been a great one for computing standing for input output. At the time you got around $10 of free STEEM so I'm sure several people made a ton of money snagging accounts and squatting on them. Most of the accounts that have been sold here have been accounts with vested power in them and weren't necessarily for the username aspect. I think that certain usernames on here could become worth a decent amount of money in the future but I think this is going to be more so with EOS.

One of my main goals with testing on the EOS testnet is to get myself prepared to snag a bunch of these usernames right when the mainnet launches on June 2nd. Now founders, developers, and the initial block producers can be quicker to the punch and will likely run scripts that will secure all the words in the dictionary if there is no cost to creating an account.

Trying to secure other accounts ended up costing me money with STEEM by the time I tried to lock more down. About $16 which in some respects is kind of high but not really considering what an account could earn.

With EOS I feel like there should be a cost of $5 - $20 somewhere. That would slow someone down from just snagging everything possible and they would be a little more selective.

When A Username Cost Nothing

I'm sure if you have ever tried to make a new Gmail, Twitter, or Instagram account and tried over and over again with different combinations and things were all taken up. Then people end up with these super convoluted usernames that are barely human readable and things you can't remember very well.

Compared to Domain Names

EOS usernames are going to have a limit of 12 characters so that is further going to limit the combinations if someone blows some script that is soaking up all the dictionary words. Then after that you have all the two word phrases. @pizzahut @crackbaby .....etc. People are going to be going hard at these and if you think about it EOS has 0.5s blocks so if a person is going A to Z it is hard telling how fast it can generate those and how much time it would get through the script. Personally I'm going to put the usernames that I value the most first in my script but in all reality I'm worried that other people are going to beat me to the punch on most of the stuff I'm going to try to lock down.

Domain names are typically $10 to $15 for .com 's that aren't premium ones that are already owned. Also Domain names can have more than 12 characters so they won't be as limited as EOS usernames. That is why I think they should cost a little more like $20. If a person is very bullish on EOS in the long term they will think twice if they are paying over 1 EOS for a username when 1 EOS could end up being $100 or $1000 or some higher amount in the future. I'm perfectly find with spending a little bit of money to go after some specific names and then calling it quits. There might still be some people who will burn hundreds of thousands on usernames potentially but I have a feeling it will slow everyone down a bit.

Best and Worst Case Scenario

What if the mainnet launches and I connect to it super fast and start snagging premium names faster than other people? You know....... the real premium stuff like @hogzilla !

In that scenario it would be great if there wasn't a cost and I got a ton of top notch ones but let's face the facts. I'm not going to be the first person on the mainnet and I'm not going to be the smartest person or the richest person on the mainnet.

If the names cost something like $20 I would be willing to probably spend a couple hundred dollars on select names if they are still available. Same is really true if they are $5 and I will just try to get more of them.

The worst case scenario is that they are $0 and the block producers blow through every combination before we get to it and I have to settle for @br1annph0b0$ . If everything gets soaked up it will actually defeat the purpose of having aliases because people will have to mix characters and numbers so much that it will end up looking as fugly as a Bitcoin address.

That being said it might not partially matter for the root level usernames as much because if there are DAPPS built in a substructure then perhaps your desired username will be available still. It just depends if the DAPP is database driven or if the database is going to be stored on the blockchain like it is with STEEM. Some DAPPs will be database driven but use EOS for payment transactions. Even if it isn't database driven it might have all the aliases once again available again. All public addresses in EOS start with "EOS" so maybe if there was something like ONO running maybe all the addresses for ONO would start with "ONO" and would associate with aliases in this nested DAPP. I'm not really sure about that aspect.

How much do you guys think an EOS username should cost? Do you think they will all get soaked up right away?

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