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Increase Dash fee rate by 10-20x ?

xkcd

Well-known member
Masternode Owner/Operator
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 !
 
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 !
I thought the default setting was 100 Duffs, it has to be manually changed in Dashcore, but ya, I could see where this could be an attack vector as it would be very cheap to spam the blockchain right now.
 
I would be in favor of an increase but it would be on the proviso that dash adds MWEB from litecoin. The reason is simple; aggregated transactions in mimblesimble are smaller and therefore cheaper.

Also, I think the price can be fixed to, say, 0.5 cents using the dash oracle price used in the dash mobile wallet. This way, if dash ever goes to $400 (lmao) then there would be no need to change the code again.

It's true, changing one or two lines of code is easier and more likely to pass, but it's also a cheap shot. Would be nice if dash did something that was awesome instead of opting for the smallest amount of work.
 
I would be in favor of an increase but it would be on the proviso that dash adds MWEB from litecoin. The reason is simple; aggregated transactions in mimblesimble are smaller and therefore cheaper.

Also, I think the price can be fixed to, say, 0.5 cents using the dash oracle price used in the dash mobile wallet. This way, if dash ever goes to $400 (lmao) then there would be no need to change the code again.

It's true, changing one or two lines of code is easier and more likely to pass, but it's also a cheap shot. Would be nice if dash did something that was awesome instead of opting for the smallest amount of work.

I don't believe in Oracles, I consider them snake oil.
 
I don't believe in Oracles, I consider them snake oil.
Truth in that, but it's better than manual tweaking as the price goes up and down.

It wouldn't be difficult to apply some safeguards, such as fallback fees if the price rapidly changes X% in 24 hours. In the unlikely event of abnormal fees not being detected, then sure, manual intervention is always an option.
 
I like the manual setting, because there some possible downstream effects, eg maybe exchanges or payment processors need to update some scripts. Also, I don't think we need to adjust this parameter until it is 'out' by an order of magnitude like it is now, so rather than fine-tuning, this rough tuning is good enough. This means we wouldn't even consider dropping the fees again until price is able to reach $400 and sustain that level, which IMO is probably never.
 
Completely off-topic i know, but mnowatch.org looks outdated (or stuck) with regards to certain network statistics
See : https://mnowatch.org/dash-stats/?20230604002225

Knipsel.JPG


Maybe someone from mnowatch.org can take a look at it (Block height and Blocks since last Chainlock)

With regards to increasing the Dash fee rate, i have no problem with DCG increasing the Dash fee rate during a general crypto winter / Dash bear market (lower Dash price) and decreasing the Dash fee rate during a Dash bull market (higher Dash price). I am not sure how much the Dash fee rate needs to be increased during this crypto winter / Dash bear market, but i do think the Dash fee rate could use some increasing.

So i support giving a signal to DCG that the Dash fee rate is currently in need of an increase. Time will tell how strong of a signal this will be and what kind of Dash fee rate increase is preferable or acceptable.
 
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Completely off-topic i know, but mnowatch.org looks outdated (or stuck) with regards to certain network statistics
See : https://mnowatch.org/dash-stats/?20230604002225

View attachment 11900

Maybe someone from mnowatch.org can take a look at it (Block height and Blocks since last Chainlock)

With regards to increasing the Dash fee rate, i have no problem with DCG increasing the Dash fee rate during a general crypto winter / Dash bear market (lower Dash price) and decreasing the Dash fee rate during a Dash bull market (higher Dash price). I am not sure how much the Dash fee rate needs to be increased during this crypto winter / Dash bear market, but i do think the Dash fee rate could use some increasing.

So i support giving a signal to DCG that the Dash fee rate is currently in need of an increase. Time will tell how strong of a signal this will be and what kind of Dash fee rate increase is preferable or acceptable.

Thanks for that, MNOwatch is not stuck, but rather captures the network state from time to time and displays it as of that date. So, the page will always be not the 'live' version of the network. The events that trigger an update are any collateral movement on chain.
 

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Thanks for that, MNOwatch is not stuck, but rather captures the network state from time to time and displays it as of that date. So, the page will always be not the 'live' version of the network. The events that trigger an update are any collateral movement on chain.
We have to paint the datetime of the statistics yellow and bold , because a lot of people are confused on this.
A similar yellow paint to the one you did in leaderboard.
 
Lets vote the numbers about it.

Why do we discuss this issue, instead of voting it in the budget?
@xkcd , if you are realy interested in this subject, why dont you add a "vote the numbers" governance question about it in the budget?
The tools that allows us to vote the numbers are ready, arent they?
Assuming that more than one proposals are needed in order to vote the numbers, maybe it is the 1 dash fee per proposal that prevents you from adding this question to the budget....
The governance questions remain very expensive. Their high price is the real reason why dash is doomed.
 
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Related comment from me on Discord:

I cracked open my old Evonode model from a while ago to get a ballpark.

Using 2,000 masternodes (ballpark after Evo stabilizes) and several other storage cost assumptions I get ~150 sats/Byte for "lifetime" (8.8 yrs) break-even whole-network storage costs.

If we use a transaction size of 200 Bytes, that would be:
150 sats/Byte x 200 Bytes/tx = 30,000 sats/tx = 0.0003 DASH/tx = $0.012 USD/tx

I didn't confirm my assumptions with DCG, so this could be way off. Curious if DCG has done any similar calcs.

Link to comment and ensuing discussion:

By the calcs above (based on unvalidated assumptions) I might even support a 100x increase - from 1 sat/Byte to 100 sat/Byte. This would put us closer to what we charge for platform data storage, but still around 1 cent USD for a typical transaction (see calcs above, which assume $40 USD/DASH).
 
@xkcd , supposing you want to spend 3 proposals for your numerical vote, and your range is from 1x to 40X, this is the application that will help the masternodes to vote on your numerical vote.


Please report any bugs ( I suspect you can find some bugs, it is a pre-alpha version).
 
By the calcs above (based on unvalidated assumptions) I might even support a 100x increase
100X increase?

Here is the numerical vote that suits better for you. Range 1-100.
I assume that you want to spend 4 dash for better granularity.

 
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Good idea Michael! (y)
It would be a good idea if you allow the masternodes to vote the numbers. Vote not only to increase the number from 1x to 40X, but also to decrease that number. But I have not coded yet voting in negative ranges.

On the other hand, and going one step beyond, the DCG should allow the masternodes to vote the numbers properly in decimal numbers. The community should demand that and should not rely on my base3 or base4 calculation code or on my base3 voting code.

But, due to the stubbornness of DCG which insists of deciding numbers without asking anyone, I decided to code that stuff in order to set the masternodes free of the the DCG slavery.

 
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Overall idea looks legit, we definitely should have much bigger fee rates in exchange for transactions storage.

I don't remember who exactly in Dash are taking tx fee comissions? Are they being collected and payed to miners, or fee rewards is split between miners and MNs?
 
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