Gov controlled min gas price

Governance
1

Currently, each Regen Network validator can set it’s own gas price.
Gas is a unit used to charge for operations related to transaction processing.
Gas price is a price in Regen for a gas unit.

Problems with current solution

Validators can set any gas price they want. In particular: it can be zero (or negligible small) or very high.

Problems with zero gas price

I think zero fees is a bad solution. It’s same as quantitative easing the banks are doing now:

  • banks is printing money to companies until people will generate enough cash flow (spending)
  • blockchain is printing tokens to block producers until people will generate enough transactions

Fee must be present in the system to protect against:

  • spam (once we have it we will need to deal with it forever unless we break some of the blockchain principles)
  • economy stability

Non responsible validators, setting too small gas price can expose whole network to easy spamming. This happened in Q1 for Terra blockchain - it encountered sever spam attack.

Problems with abnormal gas price

Validator, setting a very high, abnormal gas price, doesn’t contribute to the system. He will not process many transactions, and only take

Note: this is not that dangerous as an irresponsible validator setting negligible gas price.

Other related issues

Fees problems were largely discussed and enumerated in the Cosmos community. Here is a meta issue collecting related <a href="https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-s

2

Great, thanks for the background.

We can set a governance controlled min-gas price and optionally max gas price.

How would this be done? Technically?

Are we discussing a governance change to Auth Parameter TxSizeCostPerByte ? But it doesn’t seem to me that this sets a limit, just a cost.

Or a change to SetMinGasPrices in Regen Ledger baseapp? But that wouldn’t be an on-chain governance change. /app/regen/cmd/root.go:

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3

In e-Money we have a network controlled min gas price (the one set in app.toml is ignored) so that transactions can be processed immediately upon receipt no matter which validator is proposing. Is this how you’re thinking to achieve it? I’m not sure that’s necessary for Regen usecase (i.e. for instantaneous transactions anyway).

Would a max min gas price just be easily circumvented by setting a high min gas price on your sentries as well?

Haven’t read through your supporting links yet so will do that and think more about it.

4

Here is an example of how I did it. It took me 20 minutes to copy and modify the code.

5

Hmmm, interesting. Thanks

So perhaps we are discussing changes to the AnteHandler in regen-ledger code base: regen-ledger/app/app.go

So each validator node would need to upgrade to the latest version of regen-ledger for the changes to take effect, correct?

Thank you

6

yea, that would be the only way for this to happen. Not sure if there is any other way.

7

Wow! Awesome! This is what I wasn’t aware of. Now I understand. Thanks!

And my opinion is that a minimum gas fee / tx fee is pretty much a necessary requirement for any blockchain’s security. There are operational costs, nothing is free.

8

In the meantime, would it make sense to require validators to set a minimum fee on their sentries before being eligible for foundation delegations?

I don’t see an issue if the validator itself allows zero fees (so that validators can submit 0 fee transactions to their own validator) however a test could be performed automatically and periodically to send a zero fee transaction through the network and any validator that picks it up will be cautioned.

I know this didn’t work in the Cosmos Hub but isn’t the participation in Regen Network from the validators a little closer?

9

How do you want to caution a validator? A gently note?

What if in a meantime someone will sent 100000 spam transactions?

10

Haha, what about a very angry note?

But seriously, removal of foundation delegations should be enough. It should kick many validators out of the active set even. I think the Regen validator community is much closer than the Cosmos Hub one was at the beginning.

Anyway, I’m just talking about for the time between now and whenever any code modifications have been made.