I think @ned wants to perhaps protect the Steem Name space which is important because once someone just tries taking up all the popular names as soon as its very easy to make accounts, then thats it, same steem blockchain forever , unless someone wants to sell them, so maybe we need a steem name peace auction house so if people DO buy them up first we can make sure they are all somewhere fr sale instead of having to scour the blockchain sending memos like for @asshole and other popular names that I heard required a lil work to get, so imagine if that was done in an auction house

But yeah making sure people have to wait 40 mins to an hour like youre talking about here with POW mining to create a Key Pair, now thatd be cool, because you could get to make sure people had to WAIT an hour or so to get each account and that is fine, it prevents people from being able to sign up more than 24 accounts a day, hah imagine 2 or 4 hours to prevent people really signing up accounts, maybe it gets harder and harder to set up accounts and over time people have to go through third party hash power providers to easily create accounts maybe for a dollar, then another competitor does it cheaper for 80 cents and so on and so on, we create a nice lil market heh, or not, iI dunno this is a serious problem the name space or is it? on twitter people just adapt and celebrities and companies do things like putting "theREAL" in front of their name like TheREAL AlexJones etc. 

So I think people will adapt. But maybe it will be good to have people waiting an hour or maybe two or three to get a free account, and I think having your CPU mine in browser could allow new users to get educated on the steem blockhain, a steem block explorer can be displayed and users can get a feel for "mining" and feel like they are really part of a Blockchain! :)

https://steemitimages.com/DQmT5kELzm4KsaHDEA37tiD8BGxgZNkZbBde7kor4TvP4TK/steemit_still_waiting.gif

These sorts of infographics with live stats can adorn the Signup Page and eeducate users with Videos explaining steem while their mining for a new account :D maybe a Spokesperson walks out and says something like "Hi, while youre mining in your CPU for your new account, wed like to explain how steem works and how you can get paid for your voice on the internet!" haha that Steem Signup Page  could be so slick! 
![](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNZTpaRsEq3kxXQxFFcBwULFRpEQtfPJwgF31eEUzzngs/image.png)

The issue to track the PoW is here: https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/1768

It looks like it was pulled out of HF20, but afaik it is something that theoretically could be added in later as a soft-fork on top of the HF changes. I don't know when it is planned to be completed though.

> Our community was expecting it to be free and quick to create an account, enabling friends to help friends helping friends as "Opening the flood gates to the Internet", could you elaborate a bit on this, please?

There was never really a plan for account creation to be "free". There was plans for their to be three ways:
- "Standard" (fee based)
- "Discounted" (uses discount tokens, which will be acquired based on stake)
- "Anonymous" (POW)

The anonymous method is not really free though. There is still a cost associated with doing POW.

The signup system (faucet) is still going to be the best way for users to get free accounts, provided they are OK providing a bit of personal information (email + phone number).

If people want anonymous, currently their best choice is AnonSteem.