Today's topic is more suitable for a bull market, or at least that's when the interest would be higher due to the increased activity that affects all corners of the crypto world.
But Hive is known for taking steps before a crisis appears (on scalability, for example), not to mention by the time the bull market and the associated activity make their appearance, I will probably forget or bury the idea of this post.
In one of my recent posts, @alexvan mentioned Hive's onboarding limitations in a comment.
That made me think about the onboarding process we have on Hive and the solutions we currently have.
Practically, there are two ways to create accounts on Hive:
- by paying the account creation fee
- by using an account creation token
The first option doesn't have hard limitations (unless the blockchain starts having scaling issues), but it has an associated cost. And nobody will use it at a large scale unless there is a guaranteed way to recover the money from this operation.
The second option comes with a hard limitation. It doesn't cost anything (or rather the cost is absorbed by the network), but there is a limit of accounts anyone can create this way because account creation tokens are limited (and non-transferable).
In time, there was talk about creating lite accounts which wouldn't come without resource credits requirements (and benefits), but the idea was abandoned, as far as I know.
Then, as a compromise solution, some app developers were thinking to implement temporary accounts for newcomers.
The most common idea I heard was that the project would have a pool of accounts. When a newcomer joins, he or she would be associated with one of these accounts.
They would have enough RCs to start their journey on Hive. There would be some sort of gamification (or not). When the account earns enough rewards to create a new account, that person would have that possibility.
I liked this process, lacking a different solution, although for someone new to earn 3 HIVE (Power) as a ghost account would be hard.
Why do I say ghost account?
What would such an account name look like? If it would be on Leofinance, probably something like leofinance-temp-2346. Similar to that, anyway.
When an account with that name comments or posts, it doesn't inspire much trust to upvote it, right? Plus, a user being temporarily assigned to it, it wouldn't benefit from any auto-votes, most likely.
This is jumping the gun because I don't think there is any such system implemented anywhere yet, but would it help if in these cases the name of the user will also be listed by the front ends, together with the account name?
For example,
Peter (leofinance-temp-2346)
or
leofinance-temp-2346 (Peter)
The name (it doesn't have to be the real name, it can be an alias) is changeable and can be updated from one temporary user to the next.
Then, each newcomer using a temporary account would have their own brand to build from the start, even if they don't have a Hive account yet. And they might make connections and get upvotes easier.
Showing names next to account usernames can help existing accounts too if they were uninspired and chose a username that is hard to identify or remember.
The names aren't guaranteed to be unique, so a username is also necessary. For temporary accounts, we can extend the same idea to avatars too: every temporary user can set his or her own profile picture, which is replaced with a standard one when the user changes.
What do you think?