How Much Money Can You Expect To Make From Resource Credit Delegation?

Resource Credits replaced bandwidth as the unit of account when it comes to blockchain resources on Steem. They were introduced a year ago in Hard Fork 20. The Resource Credit system is designed to measure three types of resources in a way that does not depend on the dynamic state of the blockchain but closely correlates to the actual cost of the transactions: the computational load of a transaction, blockchain size and the state size. They are static estimates (based on regression analysis done on test results) of how much of these resources each transaction type will cost. The RC system gives a single variable, RC Mana, to represent how much a user can transact.

Currently the amount of Resource Credits a user has available to them is tied to the amount of Steem Power they hold either on their own account or delegated to them. But RC delegation is a feature that is in the works. That will allow the separation of voting power and resource credits. This feature will be vital because otherwise users who have an excess of RCs can easily delegate them to those who need them without giving up control of the reward pool. New users can be onboarded much more cheaply than before because they can be empowered without giving them voting power.

The question of what the price of RCs should be is interesting. My RC status is now 100% and I have 14,765,339,853,237 RC and my effective Steem Power is 7470. I just claimed an Account Ticket and my RC status went down to 41.75 % 6,165,233,822,886 RC. I used over 8 trillion RC to create an Account Ticket and it took about 60% of my RCs. Alternatively, I could've paid 3 STEEM for it.

Resource Credits represent real world resources priced in dollars whereas STEEM is a cryptocurrency whose dollar price is highly volatile. I wouldn't expect the price of creating an Account Ticket to always be 3 STEEM. That would be inane when the price of STEEM is $8 as it was early last year. At the current price 3 STEEM equals to about $0.42. Does creating an account on Steem really cost 42 cents worth of physical resources? I doubt that very much. It surely won't cost $24. But the 3 STEEM is a very round number. It hasn't changed for as long as SteemWorld has had an account creation tool. (AnonSteem charges $3 for creating an account but that's their price.)

How much are Resource Credits supposed to be worth in the future? It's not clear to me at all. I can see how they quantify the cost of various operations in a relative sense and allocate that scarcity between Steem Power holders. But how is the price of RCs supposed to be discovered, if a market is to be created for them?