Praise Blockchain Jesus

Out of RC DEBT HELL!

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It would appear if you are reading this that my account is back to life. I was one of the users affected by a bug with claiming discounted accounts and it seemed my RC would take 14 years to just get to 0 RC. However, there has been a lot of hard work, sweat and tears by the SteemIt dev team to make HF20 a success.

At this point, I am a bit wary to be referring to this clusterfuck as a success, but it perhaps may not be a massive failure. The bug that I encountered was unprecedented and had never appeared in HF20 testing before launch. Some users jumped to call me greedy for making the account claims. Like this comment by @fyrstikken on his highly active Github account.

Don't worry about me @fyrstikken. You have enough going on trying to figure out how best to scam the ecosystem without having it backfire like your witness vote selling campaign.

Since quite a few people have been following this story, I want this blog post to be an update for you all on my intentions regarding the account claims; and why I wont be doing it anymore (and why you should think twice about it).

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First and foremost; my intentions. The discounted account claims are priced in RC cost on a (hidden) supply/demand market. When there are a lot of available accounts and very little activity claiming them, the price is considerably low. This could even be tens or hundreds of RC. Because it requires SP to claim accounts, I figured the large SP holders such as @steem and @blocktrades would hammer the service. With the recent changes in account creation, you can no longer delegate SP to pay the fee; you need to either use a discounted account I described above, or burn 3 STEEM for the creation.

For every STEEM burned, your STEEM becomes more valuable (potentially; there's also inflation, etc but let's just assume less supply and same demand equals higher prices) and SteemIt has a LOT of it. With this in mind, I intentionally set to claim accounts right away and either claim them all or drive the prices up so the big whales would have to pay more. If you are unaware, I plan to actually use the claimed accounts with my service https://www.steemcreate.com. Also, I was under the wrongful understanding that the discounted account service had the intention for apps to be able to create accounts for new users.

Well, it worked. I claimed the accounts. A bunch of accounts. 710 to be exact. Call this greed if you want, but I definitely wasn't wrong about my assumptions with @steem (1,392 accounts so far) or @blocktrades (313 accounts). Of course there are many other users out there but these two were the ones I was interested in.

What I didn't know was that if you claim a lot of the accounts in a short period of time, and the account claiming activity increases quickly before your transactions are signed into a block, the cost you paid and the price you are charged in RC can GREATLY diverge. This is possible because the RC system is non-consensus and some witnesses and RPC nodes can choose whatever configuration they want to run. When I created the transaction (containing hundreds of accounts claims in one), the system accepted the transaction and began processing it. The transaction was handled through the p2p network and eventually made its way to a witness server where it was signed into a block. However, in this period of time, the cost for an account claim transaction had multiplied astronomically. Remember how I put hundreds of account claims into a transaction? Yeah; that's what fucked my account.

Due to the change of cost, when the block was signed, my account dipped to NEGATIVE 8.4 QUADRILLION RC. This is a problem because my current_max_mana is 8 TRILLION RC. Quite the difference. That's about negative 100,000% of my max mana.. At that point, I started doing a little tracking of the change in my current_mana every time my witness node signed a new block (roughly every 33 minutes). Here's a little screenshot of that:

This data is pulled from 0.20.4 in the beginning and 0.20.5 near the middle/end. You can see a very clear difference in the developing trend from the top to bottom. Things were looking pretty grim today when the RC regen time was leveling off around 9 years.

So basically the system retroactively charged me for a transaction it allowed thru. Now, this is not a one off issue. As it would seem, @blocktrades (currently a 1.8 MILLION SP account) has negative RC. Negative 886 TRILLION RC actually. However, since he is such a large SP holder, his max mana is 3 QUADRILLION. This means he should recover from that debt naturally within a short period of time.

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Going forward, I would highly suggest you consider your investment in this network and think about what it would mean to you if you no longer had the ability to transact (power down, transfer, delegate, update witness, etc). I know I will take my account working again as a miracle and take a step back and re-evaluate my level of risk involved in such an unpredictable network. Perhaps when things stabilize a bit Steem will be as appealing an investment to me as it ever was.

In the meantime, glad to be back and I will be around to chat and answer questions if you have any. Remember, anyone is free to join the SteemDevs Discord server for more information on becoming a Steem developer and keeping up with what is going on as it happens.

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Vote @netuoso as Witness

• Click the link above and input your active private key when asked to vote
• Alternatively, visit https://steemit.com/~witnesses
• Or click here to set @netuoso as your voting proxy
• OR do none of the above

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Shoutout to those of you that I interacted with during this time that preserved my faith in humanity and its intelligence.

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