Another case where we rely on witnesses as stewards of a consensus setting is the price of Hive accounts. When demand for Hive accounts rose earlier this year, along with the cost of accounts due to the price of Hive, witnesses allowed no changes to the base price of a Hive account to allow for the continuation of onboarding of a large number of users.
Almost 2M Hive was burned as the result of this. The 99.5% of this was Splinterlands who were getting $10 (I believe) selling spell books, so they were able to easily eat that cost while profitably providing new accounts. This massive burst of new Splinterlands users was handled with free account credits for a while. The 15,000 users/day were mostly bots and settled down to much less now after Splinterlands made some changes to make it less advantagous to game the system with thousands of accounts.
The significant spike over $3 was very short lived. As a witness it is in the best interest of everyone to not make rash decisions based on potentially short term issues.
Onboarding non-Splinterlands users was mostly handled with free account claim credits and were mostly unaffected.
That being said, ~$3 for an account (which costs the blockchain resources for eternity) is not unreasonable. Most legtimate users will easily make that back on their welcome post (something that was extremely unlikely in the past, I made $0.03 on mine for example).
I personally considered making changes to the account creation fee, but it wasn't a high priority to me or anyone else. Especially with how resource intensive new accounts are. It's also fair to say 99% of the new accounts were basically spam.
I agree with most of this except that I think the free account credits are facilitating much of the new account spam. Were it not for that, a fee of 1 HIVE or such would likely be sufficient to be a minimal barrer to legitimate accounts while deterring most spam. I have no idea, however, about the long term resource usage. It's definitely an issue. I think we'll hear more from @blocktrades at some point when they report on their review of RC calculations. They've already said that new accounts are a very expensive operation.
Most of these accounts were paying $10 for a Splinterlands spell book (requirement for all new splinterlands players) as they were bots used to play the game to farm rewards. So there was a barrier to entry for the end user and for Splinterlands when the free credits dried up.