The happy death of new Steemians?

Ideally, everyone who is on Steem should have a Steem account and wallet, but with the introduction of guest accounts, Communities and SMTs, this isn't actually necessary perhaps. I also think that in the future, because of the way SMTs are transferred across Steem but are working independently of it, many new users what know about Steem itself, at least not to the degree we do now.

Is this the death of the new Steemian?

Perhaps. Steem is a content delivery system and while that is not all it is, we can imagine it as something like Joomla, where a community built upon it doesn't need to know the underlying infrastructure. This is why in my signature and link to "Steemonboarding, I have emPowered by Steem, as this is how I see it developing.

For many of us here now, this might be hard to grasp as we are so Steem orientated and regardless of the other tokens, still largely see Steem as the foundation. But a new user that enters in for example through a game, may only know the interface of the game and not necessarily even think that much about the blockchain component at all.

When it comes to the Steem wallet, it is owned by the key holder, but on most websites that can transfer value, it is a "wallet" that is in the UI only. Youtube and Patreon do not have a separate bank account created for every monetized user account, they have their own accounts that can distribute to users when called upon. The user wallet is not user owned, it is platform owned and is only a representation. As said, ideally, everyone will have their own account and wallet, but it might not be practical and set up barriers of entry for many users into applications.

Then, combine this with other coming features like soft/lite accounts that are owned by the application and can be "rented" for a time. Imagine a game experience where players connect on average 1 hour a day to any account available. Their surface level account can be bound to the playing time and data generated bound to their account, but that account is irrelevant to own. As soon as they logout, another user could connect their own surface account to the application owned account. What this does is allow for (1 hour on average) 24 players to leverage one account in a day meaning that the application doesn't need anywhere near one account for each player, whether they are connected or not. This saves a lot of account creation.

Which is the next thing where people are creating accounts now from their Resource credits and storing them, even though they have no one to onboard. Later, an application may need 10,000 soft accounts and they can ask the community to put them into an account pool for later usage by application users who come and go.

Once one account comes out of the pool, it can be bound to the application or if devs are really clever, that account could have a lifecycle process that allows it to move across applications, in the case of one game for example dying and becoming irrelevant. That way, the account pool can keep growing and if a new app uses an old account, it will seem fresh, even though the history of it is explorable - which would be interesting over time, as it would be like seeing the lifecycle of a penny and all the hands it passed through as accounts are essentially already Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). This helps with account scalability massively and could allow for old users to sell their unused accounts into a pool where people could search and choose names that were previously taken. Dunno about how that'll work though.

The next part to arrive are the Resource Credits (RCs) themselves and the delegation pools that will allow them to be spread to accounts and give them transaction possibility even though they have no Steem. Because RCs do not having voting stake, they are much safer for delegation as they can't pool abuse as they have no draw. However, SMTs can still be applied to what they do vote on in much the same way a tribe token does now.

This way, an application can get an account, get the RCs needed for it to interact and leverage the transactions created to distribute their own token across their experience without having to pay anything at all - however the account and RC delegators will want to get something in return, which would likely be a percentage of the distributed native SMT, or perhaps Steem or fiat.

While all of this might sound confusing for some, I think that much of the process is already running in various off-chain solutions on the centralized platform, and the trick for Steem is to be able to replicate the pathways whilst still empowering the users. The soft accounts and RC delegation means that an end user doesn't have to have an initial outlay and could earn their full account over time instead, perhaps through completion of tasks in a game that generate value, or through earning tokens by way of upvotes on their content.

Due to the flexible nature of Steem and the ability to house information in custom JSON files, there is a massive amount of attributes and variables that can be created to completely change user experience from one application to the next. This can be complex to think through and develop on the back end, but for the end user who arrives on Steem but might not know of Steem itself, it can make for a very smooth and enjoyable journey and ramp up into blockchain, cryptocurrencies, ownership and freedom of economy.

One day, the new Steemian might not know that they are.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]