The downside here, unfortunately, is that if the account creation fee doubles then steemit faucet abusers will get double the SP delegated for each account they create.
But, after much thought, I do support the change, if only because the top witnesses should set the fee to what they feel is best for the blockchain and not feel that they have to adjust it to account for the problems with the steemit (or any other) faucet.
The delegation amount is optional, the 30x is recommended for a comfortable experience. You can create an account with a delegation of 1 SP, 100 SP or more. Steemit used to create accounts with 30 SP delegation, whether the minimal fee was 0.1 or 0.2 STEEM. But since the on-boarding has been increasing they slashed that in half: new accounts are getting 15 SP delegated. Furthermore, they're reducing the delegations for old accounts, depending on the total SP; for example, if the user accumulated 5 SP, they would re-delegate 10 SP, to keep a total of 15 SP.
Right, that makes sense, I just hope they don't automatically start delegating ~30 SP when/if the fee changes.
They used to delegate 30 SP on account creation.
They won't, they're running low on their own SP every time they create accounts. The whole purpose of HF20 was to move away from that model to a better (cheaper) alternative that would allow more accounts.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/proposing-hardfork-0-20-0-velocity
Steemit is already lowering the delegated SP to around 15 right after the account creation op, so the impact in that regard will be negligible. Even if the fee doubles, new accounts will have about the same amount of delegated SP when they start.
I don't think that is correct. Right now they delegate ~15SP with the account creation with delegation transaction. They don't delegate more and then reduce it (just checked this with some new steemit-created accounts).
If the account creation fee is increased to 0.2 then I believe they would delegate ~30SP with the account creation with delegation transaction instead. I don't know if they will then reduce the amount delegated automatically afterwards.
When a new account is created, the @steem account delegates 30,690.000000 VESTS to the account as part of the account creation. Later, redeemer updates the delegation to 30,282.282907 VESTS.
If the account creation fee is doubled, the account creation vests would double, but there would be no reason to update the redeemer limit, since this is in place to ensure the account has sufficient SP for bandwidth purposes and is unrelated to the creation fee.
But their is also a create free option there