What does a LIGHT ACCOUNT need to do?

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Authored by @jarvie

I'm interested in hearing what other users think a POTENTIAL light account could or should do?
How would they be used? How will they be different than normal accounts?

This is not something we're considering for the next HardFork but someone today was saying he thought they were really important so I was thinking about them a bit


MY TAKE ON LIGHT ACCOUNTS

1. ACCOUNT NAME?

  • Do they need a human readable address / account name?
  • If they have a human readable name then they should be totally different than what we have now perhaps to avoid abuse of these FREE accounts. Like @lightaccount-jarvielight ... maybe above the 18 characters that we require for normal accounts and something that makes people realize they are indeed the light accounts.
  • Or they just are a public cryptographic address is the other solution i guess.

2. KEYS?

  • What keys would a light account need? I guess it depends on all it was able to do.
  • I would suggest perhaps just MASTER, TRANSFER, SIGN IN keys.
  • Meaning they can sign into steem based apps and they can transfer tokens... that's what i'm saying.

3. WHAT TRANSACTIONS?

  • Well as I stated above I think they can transfer tokens including SMTs
  • I think they would be nice to be able to verify login
    Not sure what else they'd be good to do.
  • Change their passwords... specially using master key to reset passwords
  • Put tokens in a time-locked savings type account
    (Saftey reasons i suppose... but this may not be important)

So logging in isn't gonna put much drain on the system
Wallet transactions you'd think wouldn't but if they're doing a crazy amount then perhaps.
But we are saying this will happen in the days of RC DELEGATION POOLS ... so they can have limited transaction ability but other applications can pay the transaction cost for these light accounts most of the time.

No comments, no votes, no staking, no witness, no SPS, no jsons
(but maybe yes jsons... thing is they don't have staking and thus no SP so maybe allow it if the RC transaction is paid for them via delegation pool)


Now the question for developers is how much work would this be to put into the blockchain?
Is there anyone else capable of doing it or would we need to wait on Steemit INC simply because of developer resources?



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When I picture a guest account. I think of someone who came across a steem post via google or other forum.

I picture them wanting to add information, make an argument or comment.

I think.. Guest#### would be okay, still give them motive to sign up if they want a name.

I think, posting only is enough for activity.

To add further interest it would be cool if anyone voted on the comment if the rewards were sent to null, but the Interface actually said... Guest Account Rewards Burned to create interest.

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I like that Idea. It would get them seeing dollars being flushed down the toilet right in front of their eyes. People don't like seeing money go bye-bye for no reason.

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(Edited)

I think a guest account should be able to be a BENEFICIARY of a comment/post... but not sure about their ability to make comments and posts... that gets into the whole RC system thing. That means they have a impact on APIs, they have probably impact on spam, on votes and all sorts of systems, like account metadata any everything because then you need pictures etc... that doesn't make them very light. It seems like 3steem above free. haha ... aka normal account.

And every interface could easily solve guest commenting without the need for it to be directly in the blockchain. We're gonna do it pretty soon without light accounts... but it would be so much better if there was a place to send the beneficiary rewards of those posts and would be nice to turn them into normal accounts quickly.

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You are correct, I did not think about RCs at all. I guess the last time I had this conversation, it was assumed that the guest accounts would be on a side chain and possibly have some ability to migrate over.

Anyway, thank you for always making a plan, seeking feedback and moving forward!

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Don't forget RC delegation pools turns accounts that need 3sp/token + 15-30sp into accounts that only need 3sp or a token given by our users... users who btw have tens of thousands of tokens sitting around. And steem which is .22 cents

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I think ability to quick transfer to a full account would be great. Maybe they can earn their 3 steem.

Also, they need to be able to choose a cute profile picture which could indicate it is a guest account by using a water mark in ID pic and/or italics font in username. Similar to commenting and Fake upvotes/liked, I see these as front end solutions.

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this is from someone who knows nothing about light acc.

The things that you wrote sound like light acc focused on the crypto, token, part of steem.

from what i seen some of the points of light acc were in the social network part of it. and no comments is not very social. i do get no votes for posts, witness, sps... but i felt that light acc are for people to get into the social part of it and when they learn a bit they transfer to a "normal" acc.

Maybe i just got two different things mixed all together.

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(Edited)

Yes you have normal accounts for those stuff. So we have a solution for commenting and voting and all the rest of the stuff. And it's only 3sp... so it's almost free but it's a big barrier because who has 3sp? Well maybe a light account can get 3sp and then pay for an account or have an account gifted to them i suppose.

For example what steempeak would like is an account that a user could use anywhere that basically has a wallet and the ability to sign in to something and work to transition it to a normal account.

But yes you are correct this is primarily an account for logging in and tokens in my opinion... not as much for the social media aspect. Lots of other uses of steem beyond the blogging and staking and rewards systems.

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(Edited)

Steem it inc have said that this is reletavely low amount of work to achieve.

At @threespeak, we have been discussing light accounts with steem it inc for almost 10 months now, since we see it is critical for app development , scaling and onboarding and for investing in smts

Light accounts should:

  • not be able to comment, upvote, vote, contribute to inflation Mechanisms, power up, or interact in any way with the chain apart from the following:
  • Move steem
  • Move smts
  • One private key
  • free Wallet / account creation
  • either app or user covers small transaction fee if required
  • They do not need a customisable name initially as the urgency of them being available cannot be underestimated and we would like to cut dev time down as much as possible. Custom name could be added later on

LA’s would enable threespeak and it’s users to:

  • tip any one any where any time, in steem or Content creator smt even if they don’t have a block chain account

  • Allow anyone to purchase an smt even if they don’t have a steem account (particularly good for projects doing icos or raises)

  • Allow none steem users to easily acquire steem in order to purchase in app services / products / experiences

  • allow anyone to make auto, passive micro payments to consume content (ie 0.001 steem per view or per minute)

  • incubate and retain users before upgrading to full steem account

  • plus Miriad other factors that u might need to use steem without having a full steem account

It is our understanding that light accounts can be implemented fairly easily in the next hard fork. We are urging a campaign to try to achieve it. We cannot understate how important it is for the scaling of apps here on steem

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I could see it having one key instead of multiple as a more BTC/ETH style system. And yes perhaps we could start with just a cryptographic address instead of human readable name.

But in general it sounds like your needs for 3speak are pretty similar.

Thanks for your input I haven't talked a lot with steemit inc about these things at all so it's interesting to get your take. When i thought about what was likely actually needful i was realizing that it doesn't really seem to complex. And the barrier for a content producing user at 3sp only with no delegated SP also gets easier as well because of resource pools.

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So you think light accounts would be better implemented at the blockchain level rather than on a second layer shared between dApps (e.g. Hivemind)? How so? It is confusing to me why it would be advantageous to implement them at the blockchain level.

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either is fine, blokchain level is preferred as it seems a better practise. but if it can work stable and secure just as well on a second level, ok with me, but i am not an expert in this dept. so i would rather yield to an experienced block chain dev on the issue of whether it needs to be implemented at the blockchain level or not

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Cool. :) Yeah, I would think that implementing it on the blockchain level would defeat the purpose of a light account because it increases the complexity on the user side of things. Especially if you want people to be able to perform financial operations and to own their own crypto, then they become their own bank, with all the security issues, complexity and required education this brings. A big part of the onboarding issue seems to be about how to manage keys and security so that you can be your own bank and keep your funds secure. I'm thinking that this knowledge of how to keep your funds secure can be gained gradually - so that the person registers with a light account on Steem that is on a traditional database (e.g. Hivemind), participates on Steem socially (but not financially), learns more and more about crypto, blockchain, keys, security, etc. over time, and when they're ready they purchase or receive a full Steem account on the blockchain. At that point they participate on Steem financially. And in the meantime, since the light account generates content by interacting socially, the person can choose where funds generated from their activity go to (just like people now choose who receives the post payout).

What do you think?

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(Edited)

I’m not sure I’m 100% with u here. But certainly coming in with one password on a light account as described in my message above would be cool. Just like and eth or a btc account. No different. Then over time the user can be upgraded or purchase a full steem account

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I think guest accounts should be as limited as possible. I really like what SteemPeak already has in place.

So anything SteemPeak stores about the user off-chain could be available to a guest account. And anything that needs to be broadcasted to the blockchain is unavailable to guest accounts.

The thing I really want is the ability for guest accounts to enable full blockchain accounts without having to capture the keys. If they want to, great. If not, they should be able to continue to log in with their other social accounts and let the front-end manage the keys.

In fact, I think anyone who wants this "key management feature" should be able to associate their social accounts with a trusted front-end. This might mean they want someone like SteemPeak to fully manage their keys, even though their blockchain account originated elsewhere.

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