One of the biggest issue we have in the Steem community/ecosystem is the cost of accounts and the ability for people to gain accounts. Currently, the RC cost is 700x - 1200x more costly than any other transaction on the chain depending day and how many are actively being claimed.
> That or you must pay a 3 steem burn fee which with the prices being so low isn't as bad but any significant price increase could be an issue considering the time it takes to get consensus or an agreement on anything in the chain.
This ability is now turning into a for-profit service to use free account credits to create accounts. This, however, may change if and when we get smt's, which would include resource credit delegation to allow app's and people to generate more accounts by just
Roughly its 1 million Steem per 180-280 every 5 days an account can generate. To be even able to reach a billion users it would take over 10 years at current possible rates. Also as more app's open this cost will only grow as people will continue to use it. And the more it's used the higher the cost gets.
There are a few sides to this:
* Forcing users to buy Steem to burn it, and also force apps to buy large stake to be able to generate accounts. Hopefully increasing steems worth in the process. There is no data supporting this claim that we could find.
>The data we could find since resources credits and the cost of account creation has gone up is the reduction of comment spam. But this is more of a gain from the change in how many actions newer accounts can have. Newly generated accounts have very few actions and most are wallet transactions and custom_json transactions. But some feel because the cost it makes it harder to generate accounts for scammers and spammers to abuse.
* Cutting the cost of both account creation burn and or resources credits used to generate accounts. Which gets the coins in more hands which has a bit of economic data for in both cryptocurrency and normal fiat markets. Also with a x10 drop in the cost of account creation for Resource credits we could smoothly create a billion accounts in about 3 years. And with system like steem-engine drawing in more projects and users this could be very beneficial.
> The potential downside is we potential open ourselves up to name snipers and spammer's if front ends don't properly screen people to make sure no ones abusing it. Also, Some people see this as corporate welfare which would technically be subsidizing businesses who could be buying coins.
* Some people just want us to make account creation free to allow the masses to just flood in. They feel this flood of users would cause a flood of people purchasing the coin. This is however not backed by any data at all. Other than models showing asset security as it is distributed to more people. The spread of an asset to masses adds to legitimacy and growth.
> This would massively open us up to abusers, name snipers, spammers, scammers and more.
Whatever anyone believes we have an issue with bleeding users and any gains in the markets are instantly dumped on any form of alt or BTC price gain.
**Feel free to share your opinion on this issue, we would really like to know how users are feeling. Not just large stakeholders opinions. The little guys matter just as much since your largely consumers of the content and also up and coming content creators.**
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