Weekly Update #151
[ul][li]Since I mentioned the topic of transaction fees last week, l should mention the exact kind of simplification of fee policy in peercoin/primecoin. As I explained last week, blockchain technology is not well suited as an ultra high volume transaction processing system, thus we want to discourage tiny payments such as a fragment of cent, also known as ‘dust’ in bitcoin. Bitcoin charges additional fees for these dust transactions. In peercoin and primecoin, each transaction output must have a value at least 0.01. For the next release of peercoin, the output value can also be 0 to accommodate data transactions. But still, dust is not allowed, you either have an output value greater than or equal to 0.01 or a value of 0.[/li]
[li]Another simplification is that we don’t allow no-fee transactions, so the default 0.01 per KB fee is a requirement, not an option as in bitcoin. This eliminates the complication for user to understand the tradeoff between no-fee and quality of service.[/li]
[li]Some might question the consistency of the approach as we move to allow data transaction in peercoin’s next release. Data transaction is simply a mechanism to allow user to explicitly declare extra data in the transaction, otherwise user could still stuff data into transaction in obscure ways. In principle transaction fee is the only cost associated with blockchain space usage.[/li][/ul]
Have fun!