It’s been some time since Hard Fork 20 was launched. Dust have settled, and the new tools and mechanisms it brought have prompted many developers to implement many new, interesting solutions, which Steem needed.

One of the biggest changes that HF20 has brought to us is definitely the new Resource Credits (RC) system (which replaces old bandwith-based system), which now allows people to create new Steem accounts without waiting and paying anything.

Many people still do not fully undestand how this works, so let's divide this into pices to better understand why, how and what.

Why this is a big deal?

Creating a Steem account was for a long time a pain in the... neck. When 11 months ago Steemit Inc. asked community what changes are needed the most:

majority of Steemians agreed that account creation needs to be addressed. We waited a long time for some improvements in a protocol, but now we have them...

How this works right now

Claiming a discounted ("free") account

Let's first answer a question what "claiming an account" actually means?

By claiming an account you reserve a right for yourself to create a new account in the future without any extra costs.

Thanks to that you can create a 2nd account for yourself, first accounts for your friends or hundrends of accounts for users of your dapp build on top of Steem.

Does it mean that those accounts are actually free?

Nope. By claiming discounted you burn your renewable Resource Credits, so basically you temporarly limit yourself to do other things on Steem blockchain (publish posts & comments, make transfers or even vote):

So, if you will not be carefull and you will use all your RC, next time you will try to publish a comment, you can get an error:

and information:

But don't worry. RC regenerates 20% every day.

What "claiming an account" is not

So, if someone will claim 100 accounts, it doesn't mean that this person created 100 new accounts. This mean that tomorrow, in a month or any point in the future this person will be able to create 1, 2 or up to 100 accounts instantly without extra cost.

When you claim an account, you don't have to:

• provide an account name for future account
• provide any public keys (claiming does not create an account so password and keys are not needed at this stage)

What “claiming an account” is

Claiming an account is a procedure which require from you to burn some Resource Credits to reserve a slot, so you will be able to create a free account in any point in the future.

The cost of the operation is deducted from the user's Resource Credits, in return it receives a value of pending_claimed_accounts of its account.

The amount of pending_claimed_accounts can be checked with steemd.com

if you never used the operation claim_account, it will be 0 (And maybe it's time to change it?!)

Interestingly, claim_account has an optional option fee. By inserting the exact value of the current value of account_creation_fee (currently 3 STEEM), we will get an account, but we will pay for the operation as for a regular transfer.

How to utilize claimed account to create an acctual account

There are two options for opening accounts - account_create and create_claimed_account. Both operations are built identically, with only one small difference, namely create_claimed_account does not require fee payment, instead it consumes one charge of pending_claimed_accounts.

The operation account_create_with_delegation has been removed with HF20 so it is no longer possible. To sum up, there are two ways to get a Steem account, a standard one (using account_create) and a two-step one (using claim_account + create_claimed_account).

In both of these cases, an account will be created, whose Steem Power will be... 0 (in words - zero)! Interestingly, although the account has a 0 SP, it can work. Each account created with these methods will now have an unrivalled Resource Credits resource as if it had 3 Steem Power. This value allows the user to perform only a limited number of operations and their number depends on the amount of free network resources.

Ok, so what should I do to create an account in such a way?

Checking whether you have enought RC/"mana"

First of all, you should check, whether you have enough Resourse Credits to claim at least one account. Current cost of claming and account can be found on https://beempy.com/resource_costs, in first table:

As historic data already showed to us, this value can change very often:

Later you should check on Steemd.com, whether you have enough RC:

With current cost of claiming an account, you would need to have at least ~4252 SP and 100% of RC to be able to claim 1 account.

The process of claiming and creating an account

Currently, there are already at least 5 tools which I am aware of which supports new changes in a protocol. You can create discounted accounts and create claimed accounts:

Using SteemConenct

IMO the easiest way for non technical user.

1. Just go to https://steemconnect.com/sign/claim-account?fee=0.000 STEEM&extensions=[]
2. Verify that you are on SteemConnect website
3. Authorize and sign a transaction by loging with your private active key (read here why it is a good idea to not use your Steem master password)

Unfortunatelly at a time of writing this post, SteemConnect do not have a functionality to create new accounts using claims. I asked @fabien what is estimated time for delivering this feature:

Using Python Script, with beem library

1. Open article created by @holger80 and copy claim_account.py script
2. install python beem package
3. run claim_account.py
4. Provide a private active key of account which you want to use to claim an account:
   4.1. During typing/pasting a key, it will not be visible
5. A script will find your steem account using provided key
6. A script will display current cost of claiming an account (in RC)
7. And confirmation if account will be claimed

Creation of an account using claimed discounted account can be done with create_claimed_account.py from the same article, and by runing:

python create_claimed_account.py <new_account_name>
script will ask from active key of a creator and password for new account.

Using beempy command line tool

1. Install beem python package
2. Create a wallet by beempy createwallet
3. Import your private active key by beempy addkey or beempy importaccount like this:

1. Claim an account by beempy claimaccount (you can claim a few discounted account at once by providing an -n param)

Creation of an account is simple, and can be done via beempy newaccount. What is important is... to remember about adding --create-claimed-account switch. Example command:

beempy newaccount -a noisy --create-claimed-account johndoe

Using @mcfarhat's html and js code

Instructions provided here: https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@mcfarhat/hf20-tutorial-claiming-and-creating-discounted-accounts-1538321171071

Simply demo recorded by me is here:

Using website @reazuliqbal's website

Just go to: https://codebull.github.io/AccountCreate/

1. claim a discounted account with first form
2. create claimed account with second form

More info about this tool can be found here: https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@reazuliqbal/steem-hf20-discounted-account-claim-and-creation-tool

Summary

I think... discounted accounts can help onboard a lot of new users. New tools is going to be build to utilize this feature and I hope it will be much easier to get fast a Steem account.

Is new feature of Steem blockchain perfect? Nope :( Personally I don't like the fact that I need to use my active key for claiming an account, I would prefer to use another key for that, like posting. Another problem is, that you cannot transfer claims to other accounts, so for example... utopian cannot use their dedicated @utopian.signup account to register new users, because they have effective SteemPower (and enough RC) only on their main account @utopian-io.

Is this feature popular?

At moment of publication of this post, 405 accounts has claimed at least 1 account. Who claimed the most accounts, you can check here:

BTW, do you think it would be a good idea to have a real-time dashboard with such a data?

If yes... please follow me, and check my profile Tomorrow ;)

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This post was created thanks to collaboration with @santarius. I would like to thanks him for all his research about this topic and writing some paragraphs of this post.

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^{I'm part of @wise-team witness - check out what we do for Steem community!}