Markets clear. That's what they do when buyers and sellers are free to adjust as they see fit.

With that thought in mind, it makes sense to move to a more market-oriented resource credit system over the old bandwidth system for managing blockchain activity.

But as far as I can tell, the RC system has a couple of issues that prevent it from acting like a true market.

1. RCs are actually a derivative and not an economic good within the STEEM ecosystem. Since they are, at least presently, a function of STEEM Power holdings.
2. Prices are centrally planned. Apparently, there is some sort of algorithm running in the background adjusting RC prices for posting new content to the blockchain. I'm sure someone with better (any) knowledge of the new codebase could explain how that works better than I could.

So if the problem is actually a tragedy of the commons scenario in which a hypothetical future load of millions of users stresses the ability of witnesses to produce blocks in a timely manner, then it seems to me that a straight-forward market solution could work.

This is actually what other blockchains do with gas and transaction fees. But STEEM doesn't have transaction fees. And at the same time, we want new users with very little STEEM Power to be able to use the blockchain in normal, everyday social interactions.

That's a tough nut to crack, and I don't think central planning will do it, no matter how dynamic that central planning is. It's Hayek's knowledge problem writ binary.

The Question

So how do we get people to pay for something with no money?

An Idea

One idea I've had is to pay for it out of the author's rewards share. The voluntary inflation we all participate in is the key here.

Let's say I want to post a comment in the next block. I can bid for a position with my future rewards income. The highest bidder would go first (probably at the second-highest-bidder price), the second highest bidder would go next, and so on.

Some Scenarios

There are a couple emergent behaviors we might expect from this kind of regime:

Maybe my comment isn't timely and I don't really care if it gets included in this block or one ten minutes from now. I might bid zero for when there is excess capacity on the chain.

Maybe I want to make sure my voice is heard right now so I am willing to bid 0.5 STEEM Power of future rewards to get included at the top of the block.

Maybe I end up in debt by overbidding on prior chain actions. At that point, I'd have to either stop using the chain or power up more STEEM and curate or self-vote my way out of the minimal amount of debt incurred since the automatic bookkeeping should keep this pretty close to zero. Depending on how the numbers worked out, I might be able to zero-bid my way into curation to get back to even when there is open space on the chain.

Our experience with RC debt over the past few days was pretty illuminating for me. Equally impactful, there was no way to fix it from the user's side.

How is This Better?

So, how would this be better than the old system under HF19 or the new system of HF20's RC?

The immediate criticism I can think of is that whales will be able to out-bid minnows. That's true. It's also true now under HF20. It was also true under HF19. It's going to remain true. People who are more heavily invested in the system by staking their STEEM will have a buying power advantage over those who don't.

The main advantage I see though is that this mechanism creates true price discovery in how badly people want their content to get out there while simultaneously increasing costs on low-value content creators (aka spammers). Either the spammers would have to wait until there is excess capacity in the blocks or they would end up in rewards debt and shut out of the system. Well-capitalized spammers will still be able to use the system, just like they are now though.

With this price discovery, we can adapt to those prices as demands on the blockchain change over time. With more users, the time delay for free postings will get stretched out. The normal expectation would be that some users' subjective preferences for timeliness will be worth a bid to jump to the front of the line.

I can imagine a user's evolution from joining and commenting on a meme growing his or her stake slowly, starting to produce zero-bid content, and growing over time to a more professional level that includes bidding for priority placement.

I can also imagine people commenting, "cute cat," would never have to pay a thing.

But then, nobody asked me.