I think my mind is a little numb sometimes, to say the least... Maybe from the heat. Maybe from the markets. Maybe because I haven't had a vacation in a while, lol.
I talked yesterday about the new "Onboard Your Friends" feature by Keychain, but, judging by the comments I received, and after I read my post again, I didn't really convey the reason why I liked this feature so much, besides being excellent for in-person onboarding, where the onboarder sits (or stands) next to the newcomers and helps them through, if they need it.
But there are other reasons why I like it, which are more... technical, but people who have been put in these situations will understand what I'm talking about.
For context - especially for newer people on Hive or who have smaller accounts or who delegate their HP or RC away - once an account reaches a certain level of HP or resource credits (about the size of a new dolphin), it can use its RC to claim account creation tokens, which can be used to create "free" accounts on Hive.
Most regular users who don't delegate their RCs or HP away will almost always have their RC usage at or around 100%, even if they are very active, once their account grows enough.
And many choose to use those RCs to claim these account creation tokens, since we are wasting RCs anyway.
There are regular (I mean non-business) users who have thousands of them already. I have 195 of them, as you can see in the image below... And I used enough of them too.
I could use those account creation tokens to put the basis of a Splinterlands bot farm... Just kidding! Their time is gone and 195 is too few for a "respectable" bot farm, lol.
For my own use 195 accounts is too much. In the past there was talk about a potential market for these tokens, but that idea didn't catch on because it would have involved a lot of core programming work.
To continue the Splinterlands reference, these account creation tokens are... soulbound. For people who aren't into Splinterlands, that means one cannot trade or send these tokens to a different account.
So, for example, if someone wanted to give away some account creation tokens to Splinterlands for free when they onboarded one million accounts to Hive in 2021, so they wouldn't have to burn 3 HIVE for over 600k of them, they couldn't have.
Either way, we will hopefully have better flexibility for lite accounts. But for account creation tokens, and their distribution in the Hive community, I feel the "onboard your friends" feature from keychain is the first step where they can be used for someone else and not for yourself, in an easy way.
In the past, I've been asked and offered to create free Hive accounts for others, usually when other "free" services failed. The issue with this process is that you have to create the account for the other party using your claim account token, save their private keys and then share them with them usually via an unsecured channel (if it's discord and you are not friends, a friend request needs to be accepted first), and then ask them to change their private keys, which you don't know if they did or not. Well, you can know, if you try to log in with the previous keys and see if they still work or not.
But that's not an easy process, especially if you are dealing with a newcomer at the other end and it becomes even more complicated if you have to explain the steps by typing. They can easily get bored and you lose them.
The process created by Keychain makes things very well in different areas:
- you don't have a copy of the private keys of the newcomer; they create them on their device and save them, so they don't need to change the private keys, after the account is created using your account creation token
- you can, in the same process, delegate RCs or HP to them
- you are there in-person if they have questions
I know it's easier to fall back to a centralized solution that offers everything, automatically, when you onboard someone:
- account creation tokens (if they have them)
- HP/RC delegation
- nothing to download
But I'd argue it's at least as good when a centralized entity offers decentralized solutions that help individuals on Hive bring their friends or people they meet over using their influence (basically, Hive Power) on Hive and not the one of the centers of power/influence that have been created naturally.