Pay to play? Not necessarily.

Since @taskmaster4450 stole most of my planned post today and is currently in 3rd position on Trending (isn't Trending great at the moment), and I congratulate him for it as he did a better job than I, I thought I would have a look at another side of it. Well, not quite another, adjacent perhaps.

@taskmaster4450 mentions that RCs can make the community become more exclusive and an effectively a pay-to-play model but, this isn't necessarily true. Yep, anyone can create accounts and those with the most RCs can create the most. These claimed accounts are credits and one thing that people seem to have over looked is this:

An account’s pending_claimed_accounts balance will reflect the number of discounted accounts that have been successfully claimed using the claim_account operation. Pending claimed accounts are not transferable to other users, but they do not expire, and there is no limit on how many an account can hold.

The thing to note here is, do not expire

What this means is that large accounts like Dapps who do have a lot of RCs are able to essentially create a pool of account credits that they can store indefinitely to use at a later date. People are concerned with how new accounts are going to be able to interact well here but what they are doing is looking at how the current signup process works, not how it could work.

What I mean by this is that if the Dapps start claiming and storing account creation credits now, they will have significant numbers to onboard significant numbers. Now, account creation is RC expensive so will burn through a lot of RCs but with a large enough pool, they won't have to get too many in the future, just keep a tap open with a few more each day.

But, creating an account doesn't give it capabilities to act as we can see as without SP/RCs, they don't have bandwidth to do anything. However, this is not too much of a problem for the Dapps as once they have a pool of accounts, they can let their RCs replenish and have plenty to delegate out. And just like Steemit did with the SP delegation that eroded with earnings, they could do the same with RCs. They could also subsidise transactions (like the new patch will) through their own interfaces by using their own RCs, effectively making using their platform cheaper for users.

The benefit of doing it this way is that the Dapps are also value distributors so not only can they onboard and empower, they can also directly reward their user base. It is in their best interest of course to be selective to some degree and support their users to at least the point they get the delegated RCs back and of course, the more that people use, earn and power up on the Dapps, the healthier their community becomes too. Essentially, with the right distribution model, each Dapp becomes a new Steemit with a much more spread power base and then they issue SMTs. Pretty cool hey?

Now, what this means of course is that even though if an individual were to enter onto Steemknowing no one and through Steemit, they would likely have to pay to play but, going through the Dapps they will be able to have their startup subsidized by the community. When I say by the community, this could be through unused RCs being rented/delegated into the pool for that particular community to draw from. This gives everyone a secondary stake in the platform, another hook and reason to be here.

What this all does is create a cycle for the Dapps to onboard, empower, reward and then, rinse and repeat. They will be able to manage how many they let in and how at any one time and perhaps, who if they so choose. As they get their RCs back as people earn, they can continually feed the pool of account credits as they need. This means that the Dapps can make it not pay-to-play and instead empower-to-play.

Now, this is all conjecture on bits of information stitched together but I wanted to offer some potential as a solution so that people need not be as worried about the future of an exclusive platform. It still keeps it exclusive but, not due to financial capabilities but rather on community niche. It means that it is not a premium site, it is still a freemium one as basic functionality at the very least will be possible to subsidize.

In many ways, this solves lots of the other problems on the platform too as it pushes continuous amounts of decentralization so that the community continually fractals outward in all kinds of directions and at all kinds of levels. What this does is continually empower the user base and the developers to keep innovating, creating, growing and pushing the content boundaries to become more and more inclusive. A decentralised organism slowly eating its centralized host, the rest of the internet.

For me, the possibilities that are embedded in all of this complication is pretty amazing and although people are frustrated and uncertain about where the current situation takes us,I am feeling pretty buzzed the more I think about it. To all the Dapps, witnesses, everyonein core development and the entire community, don't screw this up because it could be bloody awesome.

Just a little bit of patience is needed and of course, a great deal of work is to come.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]