In light of the massive gains that STEEM has experienced in the last weeks, hitting an all time high today at $9.25, it was time for the witnesses to review their minimal account creation fee.
The fee has been set at 0.2 STEEM for a while, with the price of $1/STEEM, and the recommended 30 x fee, that would add up to 0.2 STEEM x 30 = 6 STEEM. Thus, creating an undelegated account with 6 STEEM (or more) was enough to give users enough bandwidth to do most of their daily operations like upvoting, commenting, posting, transferring funds.
Also, it was an acceptable cost, if users wanted to buy their accounts from third party services, like AnonSteem or SteemConnect. However, in today's trading price at $8, that would mean an account would cost 0.2 STEEM x 30 x $8 = $48 to create. It's a steep price of course. I had a discussion last night with @timcliff and @smooth (they are witnesses too), and did some tests to figure out an acceptable minimal fee withouth compromising the user experience.
The test was done with an account using a 2 SP (delegated). With that, it was possible to do about 30 upvotes before bringing down the voting power to 60%, where we got an error:
Voting weight is too small, please accumulate more voting power or steem power.
This happens when we hit the dust vote threshold, and users can't upvote anymore until they replenish some voting power, or power up some STEEM.
Concerning posting and commenting, there weren't any issues. There was enough bandwidth for two big posts and several comments, with a lot of bandwidth left.
So, an acceptable minimal account creation fee at 0.1 STEEM or maybe 0.07 STEEM, would equate to 3 STEEM and 2.1 STEEM respectively, and allow a comfortable experience. Furthermore, if the voting or bandwidth limits are hit, it would be an invitation for users to blog more and/or buy STEEM to power up.
And finally, keep in mind that accounts created with the minimum fee may still run into limitations when the network usage is high. If account creators want to ensure accounts have enough SP to not have to worry about it (except in extreme situations) they should have a minimum balance of 6-10 SP (including any delegated).
Thanks to @timcliff for his review and input on this post.
I have set my fee to 0.1 STEEM.
Available & Reliable. I am your Witness. I want to represent You.
🗳 If you like what I do, consider voting for me 🗳
If you never voted before, I wrote a detailed guide about Voting for Witnesses.
Go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses. My name is listed in the Top 50. Click 
once.
Alternative voting methods
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=drakos&approve=1
cli_wallet: vote_for_witness "YOURACCOUNT" "drakos" true true
steem-python: steempy approvewitness drakos --account YOURACCOUNT
I have no problems with a high fee to create an account. Decentivizes some forms of abuse and useless accounts that post dumb stuff.
Agreed.
Users should stick to their usernames even they regret what they post.
You post it, you own it.
I've been watching the discussions on this and just set my account creation fee to
0.1last night as well.Sweet.
How does one get you guys to create an account?
Witnesses don't usually directly create the accounts as a service (although services like blocktrades.us & anon.steem.network exist that do) - this discussion is more about tweaking the overall economics for the Steem network.
All steem users have the ability to make new accounts themselves by paying these fees using apps like Vessel
Thanks for the info. Ended up using blocktrades.
Thx @drakos.
Impressive works.
I've followed your recommandation.
Thx to @timcliff and @smooth too for the tests.
Actually I did the tests using one of @timcliff's test accounts. Their input was valuable in the discussion we had.
Can you give us a protocol to reproduce your test ?
Currently, I don't understand very the how creation fee / bandwidth works together.
Create an account with 0.2 STEEM + 1.8 SP delegation for example. timcliff already had a few test accounts with 0 SP, so I delegated 2 SP to one of them and started upvoting, commenting and posting with it.
I have followed the recommendation set by timcliff and drakos due to the results of their testing.
ha je passe par ici grâce à l'article de @evildido :-) ! Du coup j'en profite pour voter pour ton witness ;-) !
@evildido m'avait aussi filé le lien de @steemitblog concernant le prochain hard fork. Cette histoire de POW pour créer les comptes ça se confirme ?
I noticed that
account_creation_feeis not listed on steemd.com anymore. Where else can users look up the current fee?I don't know why the admin removed that parameter from the page. I'll ask. For now the account_creation_fee is 0.1 STEEM.
I have no idea what much of this really means, I saw Scrabble tiles and I love to play Scrabble lol I imagine learning what some of this means might be useful though, so, if anyone cares to enlighten me a bit, I'm not Frasier Crane, but I'm listening. Trying to understand this platform better each day.
Ok, it's done. Thanks for ideas!
Thank you so much for sharing such useful information among us. You have a great personality i like your way of talking.
Great idea
Good information
Totally agree with that. I have a service cnsteem.io to help people create account. It's too expensive now. I will change my fee setting.
I like your work it is new information for me i follow you and hope you also do dear @drakos hope I learn alot from you thank you
Ya know, I'm okay with this.
I am not an expert on the topic but I had to go through a lot of content to compile 5 reasons why 2018 is Steem's year. One the resources I went through was by @steemitblog, the Hardfork 0.20.0 Velocity proposal.
Reading your post reminded me of following things.
I think I have linked the right resource for anyone who wants to study further. Witnesses will come up with a viable solution I am sure.
The first account you make is free isn't it? It's subsequent accounts that cost money correct?
It's not free but steemit Inc pays for it
Ah! Well thanks Steemit for this account on the house.
You can create new accounts by paying the minimal fee x 30, or the minimal fee + delegating.
I see what the problem is then. Minimal fee x 30 could be prohibitive to some users.
Well we shouldn't be too prohibitive in order to attract users and increase adoption.
Yes - in some case we are little too prohibitive (net effect). Especially for users from developing countries.
Haha , you could you atract me to the post .
When i saw the titile and the photo i said : Wait , what ? i must read what this poster wants to say . And i can say i am glad i enter the post .
You are so clever .
Keep on steeming .
selling my ripple xrp tonight to buy more steem, already used my 3000 doge coins to invest on here, onwards and upwards we all go.
Woow! Awesome post!
Well I'm new in here and I post amazing pictures about yoga because that's my passion! I follow you! kisses <3
This is a good post
if f i am correct, this is for instant account creation right. like if i introduced people and i need to register for them asap
Sure, that is one use, or if any user wants to make a second (or third, etc.) account. For instance I run @r-bot, @humanbot, @beelzebub and many others in addition to my main account.
thank yhu
I like the sounds of this change. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for keeping us all informed.
So at 0.1 it would equate to $24 assuming market price of Steem is $8. Who actually does the delegation prior to getting the account to 2 SP? I am starting to get how the original delegated SP were distributed. I have seen some accounts older than mine but had only a handful of SP delegated to them at full power while I started out ~27 SP. I was fortunate to start an account when the price of steem was boarder line $1. Older accounts that open near the beginning of the year had steem rise steeply hence the lower initial delegated SP.
This is all so confusing but timing and pricing is so crucial. An account starting with 2 SP versus 27 SP is over 10 times in voting power. It certainly looks more difficult to join steemit the further people wait. Thanks.
Hi @drakos, I have followed your recommendation.Thx to @timcliff and @smooth and I have done it have drakos as a witness
Thanks for sharing this.
Your recommendation really help big time
How does one get you guys to create an account?
With SteemConnect is the easiest way to do it.
Ah. Thanks for info. Just so happens blocktrades made it possible too.
Holy moly I have to light a 20 dollar bill on fire to open a second account?!
Why is there an account creation fee at all? If I had no money in my steem account I wouldn't be able to vote anyway so why should it matter?
It also seems like that makes cold storage wallets largely impossible. You wouldnt be able to vote without having your account name and password handy on your computer, and that makes you vulnerable to keyloggers and other malware. And if you dont vote you dont get any curation rewards which means you are slowly getting eaten up by inflation.
Im still not very clear on how to even create a second account. I must use one of these 3rd party services or its merely an option? Why cant I create a second account on the main steemit website? Why is there no desktop client?
The entire appeal of cryptocurrency is that it is supposed to be decentralized and anonymous, and I have to tie my phone number to this account? How is that anonymous?
Man im really glad I tried this whole thing out before investing more money into it. This is completely nuts.
i feel your pain. i tried using another number to create a second account and it simply would not work. now i tried using steem.connect and the 0.1 fee doesnt work. it tells me something went wrong and to check my console, but nothing informative except a browserEntropy 0 events found error.