I wanted to put forward a new proposal to increase the fees 100X on the network. The post below will explain a bit more about the reasoning and process.
Current Status:
The average fee per transaction is approximate:
Mystic Valley festival had 15k transactions with $1 million USD transacted. The total network cost for fees $0.70
Problem:
This opens the network to be easily attacked (as spamming lots of transactions is still cheap)
Hard to create long term sustainability with this model. We are very far from the $0.01 network transaction fee goal.
Technical details:
No consensus voting is required for the change, as the min gas defined on the validator node level. We will supply a migration timeslot, during it all validators required to update their validator node to the latest version.
Important note:
The gas price is hardcoded in many apps and contracts to 1 gwei. We will urge all applications running on the Fuse network to take care of this before the migrations, as the transaction will stop going trough
Fuse After the Vote:
Fees will be approximately 10% the cost of those on xDAI
Running a large event with 20k transactions will still cost less than $200 USD
We will be 100X away from $0.01 per transaction fee that will allow the network to remain economically sustainable long term.
With a 100x change we will be hitting the 10million gas per block alot and this will stunt throughput we will only be able to have ~6-7 transaction per block.
I pulled the numbers for Leon on this and the Monthly average was 120k gas per block but this is an average some blocks regularly have 600k plus so will be backlogged regularly and transaction speed will suffer… It actually makes it easier to attack the network!
Getting nodes owners to update their nodes can be difficult we still have some running on versions which are 11 months out of date
Also one more point should we not make the gas price vote able and not freely available to Validators doesn’t this open up an exploit. Spin up a load of nodes set the price to be 100000x what it is now and stunt throughput because no transactions can get through?
I think it’s important to consider users of the network and consult with them, and ensure any changes to tx fees do not push current users away to other networks, or restrict new products and users for joining Fusenet.
For example Gooddollar require a very low tx cost to ensure their UBI is feasible in it’s initial stages (when the G$ token is at its genesis price) Gooddollar are a halo project on Fusenet, so their requirements should be considered carefully.
Tx fees are not going to be a meaningful revenue stream for possibly 12-18 months, so it is better to leave things as they are for the present, until such time tx volume and fusenet products are established and there is a business reason for increasing tx cost.
Additionally, Andy’s points re technical limitations point to severe problems in the network should tx costs be increased with the current network parameters.
With both points taken into account, at present I see no benefit, and only downsides, to increasing the tx costs.
I don’t think raising the fee by 100X will affect the user so much. First Gooddollar is one of that largest stakeholders of Fuse so it’s not a problem for them and this could be sorted easily. As to users that don’t have Fuse, we do want to offer cheap transactions but currently they are so low it might as well be free. And we don’t want users to get addicted to free transactions because one day we will want to charge more and it will be harder to do the change. This could be a smaller increase lets say of 10X not 100X but i still feel it’s better to start raising fees sooner rather than later because i fear it might be a difficult decision now but it might be even more difficult once we have more traction.
Also the architecture problems Andy mentioned are great points we would need to research beforehand.
I agree, there needs to be a gradual increase in the fee, rather than a big jump later on.
10x to start seems a better figure - a small increase that will test the network thoughput without too much strain, and still offering extremely good value tx costs, which is one of the big benefits of fusenet.
Validators may need to increase their hardware to mine bigger blocks as gas increases, so this would need to be phased in as well.
The gas price change should not effect the block gas limit. The block gas limit now is 10M, with the current gas price of 1 gwei, the reward for full block is 0.01 Fuse. With the suggested price the reward will be 1 Fuse. Giving this just as an example, we are far from full blocks now.
You can see my (rough) calculations of the effects of this change here. The 100x fee is still gonna be pretty small in most of the scenarios. Unless the case that blocks are getting full, and that’s good problems…
Agree, we would have to make an effort on that. And prepare tho with beforehand by improving communications. And we already started working on this
Yeah, basically it was always possible… With the design of Fuse as DPOS and the parity configurations. But I don’t see too much incentive doing such an attack.
Agree, on that. As soon that we come to a decision, we will give a large time window for all the applications and contracts running on Fuse to adapt. We will need to adjust our applications too
Yes your right sorry I had a dumb moment… It won’t affect the gas at all just the transaction fee (face palm). I did have an idea about having an auto updating Validator setup… Should solve the issue of getting owners to update their nodes
One thing we also need to consider here is stuck transactions. I’m slightly worried that people may be used to the 1gwei price they have been paying and then when we increase it they will continue to set 1 gwei. This will result in transaction being sent to the node and added to the tx queue but all validators will ignore them because they are below min_gas_price this means that any new transaction will also become stuck since the nonce will get increased at the point of sending the TX with low gas.
Things to do:
We need to make it really clear to users that anything less than min_gas_price will be stuck
Speak to metamask and mew and see if you can add a limit in the UI on gas price for custom networks
Maybe make a oneclick DApp to cancel any stuck transactions
See if there is a way in parity to not add any txs to the queue below certain gas
