Some of the proposed approaches are technical enhancements. Others are economic enhancements. It might be good to distinguish and separate these two.
This is an economic enhancement. It will be interesting to see how the decision process will evolve and be made.
What is the proposed timeline for such a change?
Clarification is required. 10k transactions by a single entity? 100? 1000? 10k? Will not the number of entities participating influence such a decision of reducing the 0.01 transaction fee?
Signature aggregation should be examined. What is the timeline?
It’s not clear that Schnorr signatures is the best option. It is still largely unknown from an implementation point of view. There are already proposed attacks that the Bitcoin people are attempting to solve. Also, there are other proposed signature aggregation techniques. Though again, the application in blockchain is still new and unexplored and should be carefully considered before adopting any particular aggregation scheme.
It might be good to wait until another blockchain has tested and deployed. Unless Peercoin has an expert in mind.
So, the concern is not activated by a rise in transactions per se, but rather there is an underlying concern that what is (effectively) one per cent is simply too high?
EDIT: the 0.01 PPC charge would not be 1%, although it might be perceived as such.
This does not have to do with the 0.01 PPC/KB fee, this proposal is to change the minimum fee from 0.01 PPC to 0.001 PPC and to stop rounding the fees. The total fee would still nominally be 0.01 PPC/KB as it is now.
As an example, the standard txn is something like 300B. This currently costs a 0.01 PPC fee for 2 reasons. The first is that 0.01 PPC is the minimum fee. The second is that the 0.3KB is rounded up to 1KB for the purposes of the fee. If we make the changes proposed, a 0.3KB txn would require a 0.003 PPC fee.
Commenting w/o a technical background, I support any efforts to foster developer use of the block chain and support lowering the tx fees if that’s an impediment to adoption; provided, however, any modification should be rigorously tested and compatible w/ applications written for other blockchain protocols.
Accordingly, I agree w/ stopping rounding and an adding an extra zero or two for the minimum tx fee. But, I’d be more skeptical about Schnorr Sigs, Segwit, Flex Transactions, etc - unless they’ve all been thoroughly tested and universally applied elsewhere. All else equal, it should be the minimum protocol change necessary to help achieve the goal of developer adoption.
As a side note, I thought I remember hearing a criticism of ethereum that every transaction was recorded on-chain and that this was a long run scalability problem. Perhaps that’s a good problem to have and we can worry about it later. But, in any event, this criticism was made in trumpeting Peercoin’s svelte self-limiting blockchain w/ possibilities for lite mobile wallets. Is lowering the tx fees and promoting on-chain transactions not a bit of a sea change from the original mission? Even if it is, I support it - but it’s good to clarify the mission statement from time to time.
Agreed with change to reduce minimum fee to 0.001 or 0.0001 PPC.
If we make this change, is it also worth thinking about future minimum fee changes. What if PPC price increased 10x or 100x and what would a fair minimum fee be under these conditions?
Changing of the minimum transaction fee charging 0.003 for 300 bytes instead of charging 0.01 for 300 bytes sounds more like a “bugfix” than anything else. The letter of the law is being held intact.
Originally this is what the thread sounded like. However, as explained earlier the minimum fee is different from the fixed transaction fee per KB. So the price increase is orthogonal.
Changing the fixed transaction fee per KB 0.01/KB, while an interesting discussion, it is one of more significant consequence and should be analyzed more deeply with merits. In addition, the reward scheme must be analyzed as well, which has ramifications on the incentives and ultimately security of the system.
Unless a transaction can be processed without any bytes being used, all transactions necessarily have a fee.
So the issue need not be “should we create a lower minimum fee” but rather: should the fee reflect, in a proportional way, the number of bytes used, subject to a maximum fee of 0.01kb
If so, this means the 0.01kb would become a percentage fee - 0.01 PPC for 1kb, 0.005 PPC for 0.5kb, and so on - but the percentage aspect would not apply above 1kb, because the cap of 0.01PPC would apply.
I did not find anywhere mentioning a transaction fee maximum? Do you have a link to share?
This really seems more like a bugfix. The fee is 0.01 PPC per KB. Though anything smaller than 1 KB is still charged 0.01 PPC rather than the correct fraction. Anything over 1KB should corresponding have a fee greater than 0.01 PPC according to the 0.01 PPC per KB ratio. For example, 2KB should be charged 0.02 PPC.
I assumed a 0.01 PPC maximum because of Nagalim’s post here:
Maybe I have mis-interpreted “total” to mean a cap or maximum. Perhaps Nagalim can clarify?
Thinking more widely, for a moment, why does making the fee proportionate to the use of bytes even matter? What causes the byte size of transactions to vary? Can it be controlled? Do people even know what the byte consumption will be?
Essentially, I ask: why should the cost of a transaction not be the same for everyone? Why vary the fee on the basis of a technical issue such as the amounts of bytes, which users may not be able to control?
PPC “cryptocurrency” transaction should have the same size and hence pay the same fee.
The bytes will vary due to other uses of the blockchain that leverage OP_RETURN, such as PeerAssets. As Peercoin is used to control and secure other digital assets, the number of use cases increases the varying amount of bytes being used. In the example above peerchemist mentioned using Peercoin as a notary for real estate. My understanding is that this data would be stored as OP_RETURN, not clear if a specific customization or done using PeerAssets.
Either way, applications that users decide to participate in is either under their control or the fee schedule is public and transparent, 0.01 PPC per KB.
This is for sure true. Also, someone that includes a dozen outputs should pretty clearly pay more fee than someone who includes only one.
While I understand the desire to look at this from the customer perspective, I instead urge you to look at this from a network stability perspective. The fee is first and foremost a spam filter. By requiring a fee burned from supply based on the data size, we ensure that Peercoin will never be bloated by spam (which is of course measured in data size). This allows us to take a philosophy about the blocksize debate that is unaffordable to a chain like bitcoin: namely that the blocksize limitation is not very important as a spam filter, such that we are confident we can get consensus raise it up off 1 MB when the time comes.
Shoes are priced the same, regardless of shoe size, so a big footed man pays the same price as a small footed man. Now, it may be said this is unfair, as the small footed man uses less leather, and should pay a lower price, but both men get the same product which does the same job - so, it is right that shoe shops charge the same for different sizes
This is my view on the fee variance. Why should two people pay a different fee for performing the same task on the network, which is to make a transaction? A nicely rounded 0.01 PPC for all transactions is desireable.
Unless, of course, there are reasons why it is not a good idea
Now we’re talking. I was not aware of the full significance of the data size. Preventing spam is essential to network health and can over-ride the consumer argument for a level fee. This means that there would be no minimum fee, and no maximum fee. The fee would simply reflect the number of bytes used. Is that right?
If they truly do the same task (same number of inputs and outputs), then they pay the same fee (regardless of how much coin they transact). The point is that someone that runs all the time and goes through twice as many shoes should pay twice as much as someone who doesn’t. This is reflected in the fee.
I would argue that the person who runs a lot is the equivalent to the person who sends many transactions.
But admittedly I don’t understand inputs and outputs - does this refer to what we can see in Coin Control, when the transaction collects together numerous little lumps of coins, and sends them together, thus creating more inputs/outputs? Is this what causes the data size to rise - or is it the number of coins that determines the data size? Thanks
If you send 10 coins to 5 people each, it will be a bigger transaction than if you send 50 coins to 1 person. These are called outputs. Input grouping is another question, but has similar implications.
Anyway, this thread is not to debate the size of the fee itself. It is about the changes listed in the OP, including a reduction of the minimum fee and removing fee rounding.