Dear Dash Community,
As you know the Dash price is currently in the toilet hovering around $40-$45 and Dash transactions fees are denominated in Dash itself, currently set at a fee rate of 0.00001 per kilobyte, this is one Duff per byte. With the price so low that means that a TX similar to one https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/t...afc07fc367141fed06f732e1b2d6ea577d2934133.htm that spend 14 inputs and has 2 outputs, a medium large TX, costs 0.00002136 Dash to send and that is about 0.09 cents. This is very inexpensive for block storage, remember, these transactions are stored on all full nodes including every masternode, that's at least 4400 nodes https://mnowatch.org/user-agents/ and they can never be deleted, so we are charging just 0.1 cent to store this data forever.
Also, note that blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum and now Doge are being spammed routinely with nonsense transactions that are significantly adding bloat to these chains and the full node operators must bear the entire brunt of this without any compensation. As their chains grow longer, fewer people can afford the storage costs to keep them and their chains centralise around fewer and fewer nodes as we saw happen with BSV which is now terrabytes in size and there are only 42 copies of it globally.
This proposal is to increase the fee rate in Dash by a factor of 10x or even 20x, it would keep most fees below a penny, while affording us some protection from future spam. The change to do this is really rather simple, this line of code https://github.com/dashpay/dash/blob/master/src/policy/policy.h#LL22C35-L22C35 is where we set the minimum fee for a TX in order to have it mined and here https://github.com/dashpay/dash/blob/master/src/policy/policy.h#L34 we set the minimum fee a TX must pay in order to get relayed by our nodes. The dust rules may also potentially need to be reviewed so that wallet doesn't end up with many inputs that are too small to spend. As far as I know, this change would not need a fork to enact, rather, any future version of the wallet could have these parameters updated and when enough of the network upgrades, TXes not paying the right fee will be dropped. Further, since both these parameters can be overridden at the start-up of dashd, in an emergency, we could restart our wallets eg dashd -blockmintxfee=0.0001 -minrelaytxfee=0.0001 -mintxfee=0.0001 and the changes would take effect.
When the Dash price is back to $400, we could again easily change these params and the fees would drop by an order of magnitude.
Right now, the cost of storage of all those transactions is socialised by all the people that run full nodes and at about 60GB for our blockchain size, it's not too much of a burden, but this can rapidly explode under high load which would be relatively cheap to do.
For those interested about the fee rate on Platform, there each TX will be charged a fair rate for processing and the data storage costs will be charged upfront for storage of that data for 50 years, so this problem does not apply to Platform where the node operators are fully compensated for the stroage costs including any new operators coming in the future because the storage costs are not paid out all at once, but rather once every Epoch for the next 50 years !
As you know the Dash price is currently in the toilet hovering around $40-$45 and Dash transactions fees are denominated in Dash itself, currently set at a fee rate of 0.00001 per kilobyte, this is one Duff per byte. With the price so low that means that a TX similar to one https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/t...afc07fc367141fed06f732e1b2d6ea577d2934133.htm that spend 14 inputs and has 2 outputs, a medium large TX, costs 0.00002136 Dash to send and that is about 0.09 cents. This is very inexpensive for block storage, remember, these transactions are stored on all full nodes including every masternode, that's at least 4400 nodes https://mnowatch.org/user-agents/ and they can never be deleted, so we are charging just 0.1 cent to store this data forever.
Also, note that blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum and now Doge are being spammed routinely with nonsense transactions that are significantly adding bloat to these chains and the full node operators must bear the entire brunt of this without any compensation. As their chains grow longer, fewer people can afford the storage costs to keep them and their chains centralise around fewer and fewer nodes as we saw happen with BSV which is now terrabytes in size and there are only 42 copies of it globally.
This proposal is to increase the fee rate in Dash by a factor of 10x or even 20x, it would keep most fees below a penny, while affording us some protection from future spam. The change to do this is really rather simple, this line of code https://github.com/dashpay/dash/blob/master/src/policy/policy.h#LL22C35-L22C35 is where we set the minimum fee for a TX in order to have it mined and here https://github.com/dashpay/dash/blob/master/src/policy/policy.h#L34 we set the minimum fee a TX must pay in order to get relayed by our nodes. The dust rules may also potentially need to be reviewed so that wallet doesn't end up with many inputs that are too small to spend. As far as I know, this change would not need a fork to enact, rather, any future version of the wallet could have these parameters updated and when enough of the network upgrades, TXes not paying the right fee will be dropped. Further, since both these parameters can be overridden at the start-up of dashd, in an emergency, we could restart our wallets eg dashd -blockmintxfee=0.0001 -minrelaytxfee=0.0001 -mintxfee=0.0001 and the changes would take effect.
When the Dash price is back to $400, we could again easily change these params and the fees would drop by an order of magnitude.
Right now, the cost of storage of all those transactions is socialised by all the people that run full nodes and at about 60GB for our blockchain size, it's not too much of a burden, but this can rapidly explode under high load which would be relatively cheap to do.
For those interested about the fee rate on Platform, there each TX will be charged a fair rate for processing and the data storage costs will be charged upfront for storage of that data for 50 years, so this problem does not apply to Platform where the node operators are fully compensated for the stroage costs including any new operators coming in the future because the storage costs are not paid out all at once, but rather once every Epoch for the next 50 years !
