The Complications of Onboarding Large Communities on Hive
Easy onboarding of large communities at once has always been a sensible topic for Hive.
What are the options, when an account is created on Hive?
- to create a new Hive account using a Discount Account Creation Token (DACT) - long and geeky name to say "free account" (sort of free - it costs resource credits, which is regenerable)
- to pay a HIVE fee for creating the new account, which will be burned - currently 3 HIVE
Before we move forward, I wonder if a better destination for the fee can be found. I hate burning HIVE! We have so few of them (don't let the "hundreds of millions" part fool you, they are not enough!), and there will be much fewer once conversions to HBD will start rolling en masse.
But let's go back to the options to create new accounts on Hive. We have the cvasi-free option and the paid version. The fee for paid account creation is configurable by witnesses and it was at some point in history on the other chain set at 1.
When the token dropped in value seriously on the other chain during the previous bear market, the decision was made by the consensus of witnesses to change that to 3 HIVE (not HIVE, but I don't want to make free publicity to an almost dead chain). After the split the same fee remained on Hive for creating new accounts, and it made sense at those prices.
I see some of the consensus witnesses started to drop their configuration for the required fee for creating new accounts back to 1. But the consensus is still 3 for now.
I've made the argument in the past - and I'm not the only one - that a new Hive account will be worth much more than 3 dollars in the future, when the masses start to understand how powerful owning your account is and the benefits of having one on Hive.
The problem is we are not quite there yet. And especially when we are talking about onboarding entire communities, instead of going one-by-one, paying for a significant number of accounts adds up, and that generally isn't easy to understand by someone used to have free accounts, however restricted, censored, permissioned and temporary that turned out to be.
I understand the position of the consensus of witnesses too. As more people realize the value of Hive accounts, claiming potentially the most sought-after usernames could become a practice and a point of vulnerability, and if they are cheap, many of them may end up being claimed in high numbers, for future profits. Much like domain names.
So, why not use those DACTs we talked about to onboard entire communities, where we see value in doing so?
Because there are not enough DACTs to onboard large communities, and if they are, they are split among various accounts who claimed them over time and haven't used them yet. And the problem is you can't put together those DACTs for one onboarding action.
I remember there was a talk about making them fungible, which would allow them to be sent from one account to another and therefore traded. But apparently that discussion didn't lead anywhere for whatever reason.
While there isn't a way to put together DACTs for onboarding purposes at the first layer, we now or very soon will have a solution at the second layer, from the Hive-Engine team.
Splinterlands has for a long time ran out of DACTs and switched to paying the fee for creating accounts for new players on Hive - only for those who buy the Summoner's Spellbook, from what I learned a while ago, so they effectively use a portion of the cost of the spellbook to finance the creation of the Hive account.
I don't know if for Splinterlands, if there is another wave of adoption like in the last year's fall, there are enough all the unused DACTs from Hive. Probably they made some calculations.
But what is sure is that the Hive-Engine tool should be helpful, and it will create a market for these DACTs on the second layer. Something that didn't exist before. And which will be proven useful in various cases. These won't be free accounts - in many cases - but most likely they will be less expensive than creating the account directly by paying the HIVE fee.
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I think the fee of 3 hive is justified. The is so much value here, but if people not used hive before. It's rather hard for then to pay the fee. There was a posts the other day regarding a free hive account. I clicked link and it looked legitimate !
Yes, there are ways to get a free hive account (i.e. using DACTs from that service). But that works for one, or a handful of accounts. If we were to talk about thousands of accounts at once (a community), I doubt anyone could offer them for free.
I would gladly pay 3 Hive knowing what I know now about the Hive. Would I have paid it on day 1? Probably not without a recommendation from someone I know.
Yes, but looking from the inside you see a different picture than from the outside. And you already remarked you might have not paid at first except under certain conditions.
And you are one. Imagine an entire community wants to join which is already formed and doesn't want to do it individually. Maybe they want to integrate at the software level and they need Hive accounts for their members.
Depending of the community and their type and size, 3 HIVE per account can be a steep price to pay. They could be thinking: Hey, we are already bringing value by bringing our community over. Why pay for it? There are cases and cases, of course.
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I have no problem with a three dollar fee. It is a one time cost and well worth the value,
Even though people love free stuff and it might be a good way to get signups.
I think the fungible idea would be great even though I think most people would keep the name they chose.
Thanks for the thoughtful article
The fee mainly works as a protection mechanism against abusers who want to amass huge number of accounts and sell them later at a profit when Hive goes more mainstream. Since they'd own the accounts, it's not like in web2 when they could have their accounts terminated for breaking whatever TOS rule, existing or imaginary.
But it should probably fluctuate with the price of HIVE, and it represents a higher roadblock when speaking about huge number of accounts (a large community that wants to move to Hive).
I think the price is a bit too high right now but I do think the price should change as the price of Hive changes. Should this be a fiat value or some other method? I am not really sure.
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I agree it the price of Hive in dollars should have an influence on the required Hive fee, since we are onboarding from the outside. But I don't think it should be something like the price feed to be regularly updated based on the price of Hive. There might be situations which require the consensus to increase or to lower this fee independently of the price action of Hive. But maybe the fee should be revised more often.
I see your point. Individually, the argument can be made that 3 Hive is a hefty price. Between uncertainty, and the bad name crypto seems to have for some, it may have a bad return when for example we're bringing in a group of 5,000 people from a Facebook group. If you're not an onboarder you might lose most of them in the process.
That's exactly the point! Great addition about lower return from losing people to attrition. I initially thought they'd find it expensive simply because they would consider they bring value to the platform, so why pay for it? Or why so much (when we think in high-enough numbers)?
Very interesting post @gadrian. You are really helping me understand the blockchain and the world of Hive! I appreciate the knowledge that you share.
Thank you! I like sharing what I've learned, although probably many times I do it in a way that's not very accessible to the regular, non-technical people.
I see your point...
I find it struggling with people around me and the onboarding process...
Yes, onboarding is a complicated problem to deal with on Hive right now. But there are some alternative solutions being built. DACTER for HE is one of them.