Agreed, that's a hard one. Free accounts would require some radical changes to go along side it, I don't think it would just work if we simply allowed it. A potential solution could be some sort of free/temporary account (where everything's "temporary" and not permanent on-chain somehow). The user could use this account to only post (100% SP) with it to "earn" themselves an account. Only once they've "earned" the account would their history actually be recorded on-chain and unlocked of all features.
It's a tall order, and I'm sure there's better solutions, but we need something different than what we have now.
@jesta, now a temporary account that was mentioned only puts us at a disadvantage in the sense that "forcefully" making an author accept only full power up, what if the person requires fund as per an emergency? The truth is that the living conditions of people differ and there are those who know how data consuming steemit site is, especially to those in certain countries. How does compulsory full power up help such a person when the 50/50 option will be beneficial?
That is like creating a matrix system where you have to get to a certain level to get certain rewards. P.S. what is the assurance that spammers are new members? A new person cannot operate such complex reward farms as effortlessly like that, they are mostly pre-existing members who we'll never suspect that are the masterminds, so at the end of the day, people who are already aware of of service like anon steem won't be deterred by the temporary new accounts. Rather, new members who genuinely want to blog and earn will suffer more.
It would be 100% SP because each account requires a minimum amount of SP to be created. If they're a new "temporary" account - they wouldn't be able to depend on those funds for an emergency. It's a limitation people would have to live with.
And it absolutely is a system where you have to achieve a certain level to get rewards. The bar is low though - the cost of creating an account. They could always pay to have an account created and bypass this entire system.
"Temporary", until it expires and then you create another free account (or 100 of them) and keep on spamming. I don't think this is workable at all.
I understand where you are coming from in terms of wanting free accounts (i.e. most other web sites) but I really think this is a situation where the nature of a public blockchain and limited resources is an irreducible difference from most other web sites and makes it unworkable. Someone has to pay for the resources, whether with an actual fee or some sort of stake-limiting.
I meant that the posts themselves would be temporary as well, which means if they created 100 accounts and spammed, when all 100 accounts expired, all those spam posts would go away with the accounts.
There's a lot of hurdles to make that happen though - which is why I said it'd be a radical change.
You can't just delete the whole history from the blockchain. There was some discussion about an idea to have offchain "free" accounts (sort of like a "Guest account"), which would be a way to do something like this, but as you say there are a lot of hurdles to it, including that it represents a big change from the current "everything on the blockchain and the front end is just a UI view of that" architecture.
I feel like we're getting in the weeds here on implementation details, but that's fun sometimes :)
I understand you can't delete things from the blockchain and I never said you'd have to. I imagine that these temporary posts/accounts would exist in a mempool like state (to borrow a term from bitcoin) - where they exist as pending transactions. This mempool would persist and propagate between witnesses just like blocks do using the p2p network. There would be a maximum lifespan of these transactions and a set of criteria that the account must meet before any of the transactions are actually included in a block.
None of this remotely exists AFAIK within Steem - so it would be a huge undertaking.
On the other hand, you're right - this whole system could exist off-chain and be integrated invisibly within the frontends.
The only problem there is now that system is responsible for paying for the account to be created upon completion of the steps. It'd be way easier than building it on-chain, that's for sure.
Yup, weeds. The on-chain/off-chain distinction is the main thing. Whether it is a mempool-like thing or a separate database or something else is definitely weeds.
As far as the system being responsible for paying, I could imagine some sort of setup where if these pseudo-posts from pseudo-accounts get votes and earn, then the rewards could accumulate in a pool or holding account or something which could then pay for accounts/bandwidth.
But the problem is still that many users are not going to earn significant rewards, ever. I'm just not sure the 'earn your way to pay your way' model of providing bandwidth is viable at all. Some users are going to be content producers and some (probably most, by a lot) are going to be content consumers. The latter need their bandwidth paid for from some external source, somehow.
See...that sounds like a reasonable option. Kind of adds to the “gamification” aspect as well. Not sure how it could be implemented though. Could it be done via a side- or sub-chain? As each user then reaches the required targets, the information would be extracted and essentially added to Steem in their own version of a user “genesis” block that contains all of their previous data.
As a new user, they probably wouldn’t have a ton of content, so I imagine the block numbers and sizes would be relatively small. And, of course, if your other suggestion can be resolved (content storage), it wouldn’t matter too much anyway.
LOL.
Steemit and Steemit RED!
Nice idea, I'm fresh to blockchain but played enough shity RPG's and media outlet's over time to see idea this work, (as a model in general, I'm new to Steem so can't comment on it really) kind of like where in a game you are restricted to level 5(intro/#steemitlyf so can read everything but have restricted input) then graduate to Steemit.
From my basic software understanding with cryptoing, blockneting and interneting I can't see why this concept would not work as a general platform level in the near future IMHO.
nice comment