Steem witness, Timcliff recently made a community proposal on github about making changes to how resource credits (RC) are allocated to Steem accounts. I liked it and would love to see it implemented on Steem. Here’s what he proposed:
The current implementation for the minimum account usability RC calculation maintains a state object for each account in order to keep track of the account creation fee at the time of each account’s creation. The benefit of this is that it is most fair (you get exactly how many RCs you paid for) but it is less efficient than just giving everyone the same amount of minimum RCs, regardless of how much their fee was.
Also, as the system usage changes, the amount of RCs that are needed to transact will likely not remain the same. It is possible that in the future, accounts may become unusable with zero SP if the amount of RCs their account creation fee provides them is no longer enough for minimum transactions.
Witnesses would like to be able to control the amount of RCs accounts with zero SP have, and to be able to set this value independently of the current account creation fee. After discussing with @iamsmooth, it seems the best way to handle this would be to create a new witness parameter for the minimum account usability:
Create a new witness parameter for minimum account usability.
Change the RC calculation to give accounts a minimum RC balance based on the new parameter instead of their account creation fee.
Update the witness parameter documentation to include this new parameter.
In layman’s terms, the proposal is asking for adding a new feature to Steem that will allow Steem witnesses (they are like block producers of EOS) to set the value of minimum resource credits a Steem account will have even if it has zero Steem Power. At the moment, Steem accounts are allocated resource credits based on how much Steem Power they hold.
Steem accounts that have very low amount of Steem Power are unable to post / comment more than a few times each day because their RC balance run out very fast. This may not be a problem now but if Steem becomes a lot more popular in future, it will become a huge issue. Due to high usage of resource credits, (more users = more use of RC) the RC share for small accounts will shrink more.
In order to avoid that kind situation, Steem should provide the minimum resources to all accounts so that they can transact at least a few times. This will prevent account lockup in case a user powers down all of his Steem Power. Overall, this feature will have a positive impact on Steem’s user experience. This is why I support this proposal.