Thanks for keeping us informed with the current ongoing discussions of the witnesses and the Steem dev team, @timcliff. I can see why this is a much debated issue, and I get why some of you witnesses are skeptical to increasing the bandwidth, since it could easily lead to less interest by exchanges, as well as more spam.
I don't really think new users will be annoyed by bandwidth limitations if they 1) know it's there before they hit it, and 2) they are able to preform a reasonable amount of transactions before they hit the limit.
About how many transactions would a brand new users have to do before getting limited?
That last part is a really important question. Unfortunately the answer right now is we don’t know. It depends on a lot of factors, and it changes.
Defining what the limits are is a really important part of this to get right IMO.
Oh, that makes it really complicated then. Would it be possible for someone to create an app/website that could display something like "current number of available transactions"? Or is this a metric that is too complex to display in such a manner?
I believe it is too complex with the current rules unfortunately. That is one of the biggest problems.
Ah, that's unfortunate! Would this be something that could be changed/"fixed" at one point? Because I believe we would solve a very big part of this problem if we were able to tell exactly for many transactions a user has left.
Generally, you can see this if you go to https://steemd.com/@[your username]
Right now it's flaky but I have always relied on it to keep tabs on my bandwidth and VP
Ah, that's good to know. Maybe it would be possible to display this for those who run out of bandwidth in the Steemit UI, so they know what's wrong.