Scale Sans Abuse

I'm a billionaire! And I just gave someone 20,000 billion. *Granted, it was my own alt account.* >Who thought these kinds of numbers were a good idea? Perhaps it allows for precision spends, but with the changes in Resource Credit costs after the Hardfork, my Splinterlands rental account was recovering very slowly, so I gave it a helping hand and delegated RCs across. I also then could remove my HP delegation to it, so in five days, I will get that back.   They have been a *long time* coming. And, because there is no direct risk of reward pool abuse through RC delegation like there is with HP, it can essentially be delegated and undelegated on the fly, whereas removing a delegation of HP comes with a 5 day return protocol before it can be actively used again. Couse you know - if there is the potential for abuse, *people will abuse.* >Not all people mind you. *Just enough.* Expecting people not to abuse exploits is a losing game, because people will continually take advantage unless the loophole is closed. I tis like the "pay what you can" attempts at business where eventually, *they don't last* because people will increasingly reduce "what they can" regardless of whether then *need to* or not. But, if people didn't attack weaknesses in the system, the systems wouldn't develop as fast or as well as the do - innovation wouldn't progress. It is why so much innovation comes out of military development, because they are essentially looking to attack through enemy defenses, so are looking for any weaknesses, or are looking to create weaknesses where a credible attack vector might not yet exist. This is what "undermining" is, where heavy walls surrounding a castle could be brought down, by digging beneath to make them collapse. I was just thinking what the abuse might be for RC delegation, but the worst I could come up with at this late hour, was Spam comments. However, I don't think that would take much HP anyway. What I hope with the delegation capabilities now though, is that it will be used to bring people onto the platform and allow them to engage without having to buy HIVE straight up. This sounds like a negative, but I think that getting a lot of people in and allowing them to interact early would be more beneficial overall. I am not sure if it is possible to do, but it would be interesting to run some kinds of campaigns for mass signups where an RC pool automatically delegates enough RCs to the accounts for them to do what they need to do and then, let them earn HP over time if they don't want to buy. Once they have enough HP accumulated or if they go inactive, the delegation is removed. It could also be possible that the RCs are delegated on the fly at sign-in too, which would be suitable for gaming for example, where as they come in the door they are given RCs and when they leave again, those RCs are removed to wait for others to arrive. I was thinking about this for Splinterlands, where for example, they could have 1000 Splinterlands promo accounts that are numbered on the Hive blockchain and can be used for "trial" purposes by new players, letting them play a number of games before taking the seat back. They could even deck them out with cards for different levels of play and anything the accounts earn could get burned or, go into a kitty and distributed to SPS holders or something. This would give the chance for new accounts to trial and perhaps allow for current players to try higher leagues with a different set of cards for a game or two, *if the seat is available.* Similarly, it could also be used by @threespeak where there are hot accounts that people are able to use to comment, without owning a Hive account. The accounts can comment and earn, but the person commenting doesn't earn anything directly, or give options on how to earn or buy a full Hive account. The earnings from the accounts could go into other activities, for example, token buybacks or straight to the Hive Development Fund. Whatever they end up getting used for, what it does is effectively scales the amount of users capable of being on the platform. For example, there is 387,874,709 HIVE in circulation and if every user needs 100 HP worth to transact on average, that is ~3,878,000 accounts possible. However, in order to spread HP out that way, all of those accounts would have equal amounts of draw on the rewards pool. That means that my account that has about 200K HP, could empower 2000 accounts to transact at 100 HP worth, but in order to do so, I would have to give up my own voting power. However, with RC delegation it would be possible for me to do that *and still keep* my voting power. If there was a "delegation on sign-in" system, it is likely that not all 2000 would be signed in simultaneously, which means if 33% are, it could be used to empower 6000 accounts instead. With RC delegations, this can be done on the fly and possible scale depending on usage, so most will need far less than the 100 at any given point in time. This means that instead of the ~4M possible transacting accounts in a highly improbable scenario where everyone has equal HP - it would be possible for tens of millions of accounts to get RC delegated to them to transact when they need them, never having to worry about buying HIVE - unless they want to earn. Remember though, that in order for these accounts to earn from the rewards pool, *staked users* have to vote them and that is going to get harder to accomplish, with so many users transacting. However, for the accounts who are staked, their curation returns are what they are, they don't have to compete for attention to earn. There are lots and lots of different ways Resource Credits can and will be used in the future, but I am sure that in time, they are going to get used for both better and worse. However, having the delegation system opens up a lot more potential to scale, without a lot of risk exposure to the economic system. It could get interesting. Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]