I think both approaches are valid but I think the extra weight and risk on the chain of RC pools make me lean towards implementing direct RC delegations with posting auth (even though I'll have to redo everything haha) along with a tool for people to "trail" other people's delegations. The UX benefits are also non negligible.
100% agree. Pools could be added later if we really want oversubscription.
About RC faucets, it would be really convenient if users could delegate their RC to one account, and then that account could become a faucet for all of hive. It could even charge a small fee for RC delegations, giving a return back to the RC delegators. But this requires the ability to delegate delegated RCs, which you said introduces too many edge cases.
Any other way to achieve that? Maybe create a special account on the chain acting as a fee based RC pool?
This is RC pools in a nutshell haha, I don't think we should enable people to delegate delegated RC because it can create some performance hogs on some blocks.
But then who would control that account ? I didn't give it a ton of thought but for now I think the best way to achieve "everyone can contribute to RC delegations" is RC delegations trail where you decide to trail an account creation system, and if you see it delegating 10 RC, you delegate 10 RC too, it's less efficient because it's hard to tell how much RC will be delegated when delegating but it works.
No one. We can just automate it to set a price for RC in hive according to supply/demand, a bit like eth gas. It requires a hardfork obviously, because that would have to be done using a smart contract.
Yes, except pools can't charge a fee. I used the word faucet but I meant a pool that charges fees, not giving RCs for free.
I am sure some people would prefer paying one time fees over powering up hive when getting to know the blockchain. Right now, RCs are really cheap so people can buy small amount of hive without worry.
However, if RCs ever become scarce, then people will not want to stake hive for 13 weeks just to try out some things, a fee based approach will be cheaper if markets are efficient.
So long term, fees on hive will be necessary, whether it's done through a centralized app like dlease and direct RC delegations or through a pool like we're talking about.
I think the pool would be much better because otherwise investors who stake long term and loan RCs will have to keep updating their delegations, like on dlease right now.