This is an aside, but other than convention, is there a reason that we care about the size of a transaction, as a function of the fee? I get that there is an impact, but realistically, does it really matter? With Bitcoin, blocks are constructed, so there are cases when miners will filter out some transactions based on their size and lack of (or limited) fee that was paid. With Peercoin, I don’t believe this is such a concern.
In my opinion, experience is better and easier to predict and understand if the fee is fixed, for all transactions. The current variability in the fee, that isn’t realistically under the control of sender, is something that if we could safely remove, I would support.
I don’t understand the technicallities, but guess you are asking whether there should be a flat rate fee for all transactions (0.01 ppc), regardless of the number of peercoins/kilobytes involved? I would favour that, because it makes everything simple and easy to calculate, easier to explain and market peercoin, etc. I don’t see the point or benefit of having a difference between a 0.01ppc and a 0.02ppc fee
@NME: I believe you misunderstood the basis of my question.
I understand why a fee exists, and I’m not asking for a removal of the mandatory fee, but my question was concerning why the fee needs to be variable as a function of payload size.
As it stands, it’s very difficult to explain to someone who isn’t versed in the technicals of cryptocurrency why their transaction that sends 1.00 PPC from one address to another (but is comprised of the sum of 13 input transactions of ~0.0705 PPC each) will cost 0.02 PPC, but sending 1,000,000 PPC from one address to another (comprised of two input transactions of ~500,000 PPC) will only cost 0.01 PPC. This is especially galling when one considers that the average user doesn’t have control over which inputs are used to create the new output.
If the network is “comfortable” with 0.01 PPC transactions, for most of them, I’d like to understand more about why we can’t normalize the transaction to always be 0.01 PPC, regardless of the size of the transaction.
I’m ok with the cost of the minimal fee, today, but this isn’t about DDoS attacks with “dust” transactions. Under my proposal you would still pay 0.01 PPC for a transaction, the difference being that the max you would pay would also be 0.01 PPC.
Dust transactions are never free, and can’t be abused.
As stated in above, I support the idea of a consistent fee (0.01 PPC)
But to test this proposition further, can anyone put forward a good argument as to why there should NOT be a flat fee? Are there advantages to a varying fee that we should think about?
Let’s say you have 150 PPC you want to send to some one. That 150 PPC you’ve accumulated comes from:
one transaction you received of 50 PPC
one transaction you received of 25 PPC
and seventy-five transactions you received of 1 PPC each
Once you send that 150 PPC to some one, the transaction will have to include 77 transactions to prove that you have the coins to send. That eats up a certain amount of kilobytes.
Now let’s say you want to purposely create blocks for some reason. (We can go into why later)
You now send 150 PPC, but you purposely send it in 7,500 separate transactions.
(7500 x 0.02 = 150 PPC)
So now this new receiver, has 7,500 transactions received of 0.01 PPC each to make 75 PPC. So by now, you’re wondering, what is the benefit, especially since 75 PPC was destroyed in transaction fees during this process.
If you can force new blocks to be created, by purposely splitting up coins into multiple transactions, and eating a lot of kilobytes…
You bloat the blockchain
You can encourage forking, which is an attack on the network that checkpointing needs to fix
You can know when a lot of blocks are about to be created, and take advantage of times when main pools are being DDoS’d in a short window to turn up your miners and start solomining during this short window
So having your transaction fee tied to the SIZE of your transaction is important. It discourages this behavior even more.
So from a business sense, sure, 0.01 flat-rate transactions irregardless of kilobyte size sounds nice.
From a network perspective, it gives an unnecessary advantage for new attacks to occur which we don’t want… I don’t know how effective it would be, but I know there “is” a difference.
There we go. There’s a reason that has an impact can be calculated. To play devil’s advocate, at 1MB per block, max, it only costs 10.24 PPC to fill one up, even paying the fees (1024 kb * 0.01 PPC/kb). In reality, that’s not a huge deterrent (at current prices).
Edit: That doesn’t take into account the cost of setting up the attempt, which would require a bunch of inputs that could be combined into a 1024 kb output. Presumably that could be financed by a bunch of different people sending me funds (say, if I’m an exchange).
Higher fee for processing and storing bigger blocks doesn’t seem difficult to explain. It’s not a totally a fee. It’s a tax for the health of the network and the deflation force in Peercoin economy model.