Splinterlands game accounts, Travel.io Free Accounts, Your Friends Guest Account and the New Proposed Light Accounts are all made possible by Delegation and Resource Credits.

Hello Steemians,
One of the interesting things about Steem is the flexibility of the blockchain and your options for getting stuff done. One of the issues with new people trying out the platform is buying Steem , powering it up and generating resource credits so you can perform transactions like posting articles, uploading pictures, writing comments and upvoting articles. Delegation of Steem power is a great solution to this singular, but multi-faceted problem.

When a new account holder signs up in Travel.io they are delegated about 15 SteemPower, which more then enough to start posting pictures and articles. When I say more then enough, I mean 15 SP carries with it more then enough Resource Credits to post and comment, in the manner and number expected for a typical new user. Although transactions on Steem are always described as Fast and Free, that’s only a surface look and the majority of users don’t know that you actually utilize something called Resource Credits to carry out transactions on the Steem blockchain.
These are transactions and they require Resource Credits, which are generated daily by SteemPower. But it’s something that happens “below the surface” or “under the hood” so you don’t need to know or understand it, until you run out and can’t post or you invite someone here and create an account, but forget to give them some Steem and have them “power it up” to SteemPower. So bloggers need it to blog and Similarly for games, the new player can be delegated a small amount of SteemPower allowing them to play. I believe Splinterlands gives new players a small delegation so they can play matches and trade/buy cards. These are transactions and they require Resource Credits, which are generated daily by SteemPower.

Today I would like to talk briefly about delegation and resource credits. The “under the hood” operations of the Steem blockchain. While the most commonly known and understood way to make Steem is through content creation (author rewards) or content consumption and upvoting (curation rewards), there is a third way of earning Steem called Delegation. When you earn Steem through delegation, you don’t create content and you don’t upvote content. You invest money in Steem, you Power-up your Steem to Steem Power and then you loan Steem Power to other people or businesses on the Steem blockchain, through a loan process called delegation. The people or businesses you delegate your Steem to, make money and give you a percentage. That’s delegation in brief and I will describe it in more detail below.

Delegation explained
To understand delegation you need to understand that unlike many other cryptocurrency blockchains which have one coin, the Steem blockchain has three called Steem, Steem Power and SBD. Influence on the Steemit platform depends on how much Steem you have “Powered Up” or converted to Steem Power. Steem Power determines how much your vote is worth on the platform. Because it’s our Steem Power and not our Steem which determines the value of our vote, we delegate or loan our Steem Power to new accounts, businesses or projects through a special loan process called delegation.

The Safety of Delegation
I have loaned people money before and it is always risky because once you give someone your money. There is a risk of them not returning your money or the business fails and you lose all your money. The wonderful thing about delegation is that you when you delegate Steem Power you still control it. So you can take it back anytime you want by Un-Delegating it. You don’t have to ask permission to take it back and you don’t have to wait for someone to give it back to you. You just Un-delegate it.

Examples of Delegation
You can delegate your Steem Power to a new account, a project or a business on the Steem blockchain. You can delegate for free to help new people get started or you can earn passive income when delegating to a business or curator.

Delegation is a Passive Investment
The other great thing about delegation is that it is passive. You delegate to a project and then you earn Steem if the project earns Steem. Now you don’t have to do anything else.

How to Delegate
The simplest way I know to delegate is by using Steemworld. I type www.steemworld.org/@shortsegments into my browser and then hit return. Then once my personal page loads I go to the section called delegation and choose who I want to delegate to and how much. Then a box opens and I have a choice of using Steemworld or Steemconnect to delegate my Steempower. I advise everyone to use Steemconnect for all transactions involving moving money out of your wallet with your active keys for safety reasons. You have probably figured out that most people and applications use Steemconnect for moving Steem out of their wallet to prevent theft of their private keys and loss of their Steem. There are several reasons, but one is Steemconnect doesn’t save copies of your keys on their server, so once your transaction is done your keys disappear.

Un-Delegating
When you want to take your Steem Power back you use the same delegation section and replace the amount of Steem Power you delegated with the number zero and you get all your Steem Power back. So if I delegated 100 Steem Power and I wanted to get it back, I would go in and delegate to the same person again, but this time instead of delegating them 100 I would delegate them “0” or zero Steem Power and get all my Steem Power back.

Delegation things you should also know.
You can only delegate Steem Power you own. So you can’t delegate Steem Power you leased or Steem Power someone delegated to you. Once you undelegate Steem Power the project or business you delegated it to loses that Steem Power immediately and can no longer use it. However you won’t be able to use it for 4 days. This is a safety feature to protect the blockchain from people who would abuse this delegation system.

Now while this is a short and simplified version of the process, I feel it hits the important points you need to understand about delegation. Let’s move on to Resource Credits.

What are Resource Credits?

This term is defined by it’s creators, the software developers who worked for Steemit Inc., and published information on their blog called @steemitblog. Their definition: Resource Credits are non-transferable credits given to each account based on how much Steem Power it has, which get “spent” whenever a user transacts with the Steem blockchain. So what function doe this new entity called Resource Credits perform on the Steemit Platform? They are a form of currency you spend to enact or perform transactions on the platform. What are Transactions: They are votes, comments, transfers and power ups. You pay or expend Resource Credits when you perform transactions or interact with the Steemit platform. Each transaction has a specific cost in Resource Credits, if you have enough resource credits to cover the cost, you can perform the transaction. If you don’t have enough resource credits you get an error message telling you that you are unable to perform the transaction or interaction. You should also be aware that the cost of transactions varies depending on factors that effect blockchain perform and the available supply of resource credits.

Let’s do some FAQs, I love Frequent;y Asked Questions. I write these articles and then like to see if my article answers what I think would be obvious questions.
Questions:

1. How do I get resource credits?
   Answer: You are given a certain amount of resource credits in direct proportion to how much Steem Power you have. You need at least 15 Steem Power to be awarded any resource credits.

2. If I spend all my resource credits, do I have to buy more?
   Answer: No, resource credits regenerate each day by a certain percentage, which is believed to be 22% and it takes 5 days to fully regenerate your entire allotment from zero.

3. Can I buy resource credits?
   Answer: No they can only be given to you buy Steemit when you buy Steem Power.

4. Can I give my resource credits to others?
   Answer: No, these tokens are non-transferrable, they are attached to Steem Power. But you can delegate part of your Steem Power and the resource credits go with the delegated Steem Power.

5. How much do transactions cost?
   These are the costs I see on Steemd.com: They are subject to change but prices at the time I researched this article were;
   comments 1,570,000,000
   votes 282,000,000
   transfers/powerups 259,000,000

Final words and closing comments

That’s a look at what’s “under the hood” of the Steem blockchain engine!
I think that just like your car, you never notice what’s under the hood until something goes wrong, like you can’t post or comment and you get an error message which says you have insufficient resources credits to carry out the transaction. But invariably, if you wait a day or even a few hours you generate more and the problem resolved itself. It’s very important to understand these things if you want to “onboard” new people such as Splinterlands does or Travel.io does. Or if you invite your friend to Steemit and they haven’t bought any Steem, just delegate them 15 SteemPower or SP and they will probably be fine and never need to know what’s under the hood.

Stay informed my friends. Knowledge is power, power brings wealth and wealth is life changing.

✍🏼 by Shortsegments

Other useful information from the GitHub article on Resource Credits:
This information restates some of the information above in slightly differen ways, which might be useful.
The RC bandwidth system is a complete rewrite of the bandwidth system. Its goals include:
• >Enable simple, effective UI feedback to users about bandwidth usage and >remaining bandwidth
• >Simplify the mental model of what buying additional SP gives users
• >Reduce or eliminate unstable feedback in current bandwidth system
Resource credits
Each account has a manabar called "resource credits." Resource credits have the >following characteristics:
• >RC's are attached to a particular account and cannot be transferred
• >An account's maximum RC is proportional to its VESTS
• >Transacting uses RC
• >Transactions which would cause a negative RC balance are blocked
• >RC regenerates over time
Computing Price
The price of each resource will be based on the current level of the stockpile. As the stockpile decreases, the price of that resource (in terms of RCs) increases. In other words, as the stockpile goes down, accounts will have to pay more RCs to use the remaining resources.
Cost in RCs won’t translate into anything like a price increase in terms of STEEM or USD, due to the fact that RCs are non-transferrable. The goal is only to leverage a market system to ration resources, not to create speculative opportunities or manufacture another token that can be used to purchase goods or services.<
Computing Cost
For each transaction, the System will statelessly compute a value and exchange rate in RC for resources like CPU megacycles, state memory, and history size.
Sources
@steemitblog
Steemd.com
Steemit GitHub

Title: Splinterlands game accounts, Travel.io Free Accounts, Your Friends Guest Account and the New Proposed Light Accounts are all made possible by Delegation and Resource Credits.