Why are you guys incrementing the minimum fee on Minerva release?
There is no attack, we are still developing on the blockchain, and increasing the fees to prevent something that has not happened yet seems like the worse idea ever.
While all other coins have had development done so they could lower their fees to be used, you on aeternity are rising them.
I wish there was like a voting system or some sort of collateral for the people that have the coin or the people like me that invested on this since the very fist phase to vote on changes like this.
I am really disappointed in this rise in price
Increase fee is the right decision. The gas need to be suitable for the network capacity.
In Roma release, only several AE can make the blockchain data bigger than Etheruem. Attacker can easily make Aeternity not usable by send mining less transactions.
Blockchain on-chain transactions are for money transfer, we must make sure only data which have some value should be stored. All other low value data should be stored off-chain, like in state channel.
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It means if an attacker appears, only several AE can make the network not usable. All other 300 million-coin holders are affected and need to cover the cost for the network not usable and the big blockchain data.
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The blockchain is already 1.7gb of data. I don’t see how we are preventing anything 
(I am not sure if you saw this, so I am re-sharing it)
Hey @Kryztoval,
I had the exact same reaction as you when I first heard this! 
The primary reason for the change is related to the healthy functioning of the network. The Roma on-chain fees were basically non-existent. This sound great, but they flip side of it is that miners are not really interested in creating microblocks - they get the coinbase from the key block which is currently huge and don’t care about microblocks, were they get at best a tiny fraction of an AE. The low fees simply do not create a solid economic incentive to create microblocks. And in Bitcoin-NG microblocks are where transactions are verified.
So, generally, the fee-related tweaks are being put in place in order to create a solid incentive for miners to want as many microblocks added to their keyblocks. This should have a very positive effect on network performance. Moreover, we expect most of the “action” to happen off-chain, were fees are non-existent. We definitely need a solid, well-performing main chain though.
Best,
Vlad
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@Kryztoval let me jump in here. (I am from the dev team)
In fact spam prevention is major driver here. When we do the match it turns out that for a $1 we can post terabytes of data to the chain. Because of that, the change was coming anyway and communication about it was especially hard. If we highlighted the issue and planned prevention, the chain got super vulnerable for the time until upgrade. This is why we communicate it post-release. I hope you can justify us here.
Regarding the fees alone. They are still low. Fee filter have two layers. The first is configurable by miners and it doesn’t impact consensus and protocol. It is in miners hands anyway. Alternative implementation could have it.
The second layer of fee control is in protocol - the minimum gas cost. Currently, it is much stronger condition and this is why we made it 3 orders of magnitude lower.
Currently you may hit the first layer - configuration by miners. The second is 1. much lower 2. not activated.
Still, when we implement governance, community may create a poll and adjust it. Before that we need to find middle ground by negotiating here 
The extra benefit is that our NG consensus algorithm may work better with bigger fees.
Also, I would like to comment about your point regarding another blockchains. It is worth to mention that we have functioning state channels that let us remove whole lot communication off chain! The fee adjustment doesn’t impact in-channel communication!
@Kryztoval with that broader view - what’s your position on that change?
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That is important to notice!
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Haha, in fact I realized the problem when I firstly use Aeternity. Only several AE is enough to abuse Aeternity network and make it not usable and fail.
But I am not a bad attacker, but a supporter of Aeternity. I have been in crypto currency since 2013.
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And I still think the fee of Aeternity is too cheap. On-chain is for the settlement of AE currency. Not for the low value transactions.
Just go the check ADA, its fee is much higher than Aeternity. They know what they are doing. On-chain is for high value transfer and only high value data should be stored on-chain. All other transactions should be off-chain.
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Currently, it is easy to configure by miner the “gateway” fee.
The protocol one itself is trivial as well, but fixing some tests takes a bit of time.
All in all when we have governance, everything is up for change.
I understand you, but please remember that ae is not only currency. It’s primarily very powerful VM. So, we want those public contracts affordable and ubiquitous. We will work out the balance when we see how the platform is used.
@xiahui135 Also mind that we slowly travel the path of lifecycle of a blockchain. What was OK three months ago, may not be OK now.
VM is to make the blockchain stronger. And the blockchain is to make the currency more secure and smart.
Currency is the final product of a public blockchain. And the public blockchain which control the inflation is the cental bank of the crypto currency.
yes & no
Decentralized apps are one of the new values introduced by blockchain. So, it may be the very reason to run a blockchain.
Currency - yes, the blood of the system. Recently Paul Sztorc wrote about fees as security budget. I think you would agree with some of his thoughts.
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Crypto currency is the reason why we need Dapp.
- Why the dapp Golem have some value? We can also make it without blockchain. But without blockchain, people need to pay and get paid in fiat. This will limit golem to a be regional application and make payment slow and expensive.
- Why bets based on blockchain need to exist? The core reason is the crypto currency. Betting is an application where people can play with their money. Crypto currency solved many problems which fiat haven’t. This is un-replaceable use-case.
You may say the blockchain provides the VM for betting and protect dapp from regulators. Yes, it is. But this is replaceable. If there was no blockchain technology, and some new technologies appear in future, we also need betting app and currency like crypto.
The blockchain is the tool, and the currency is the goal. Maybe human will invent other tech better than blockchain in future to replace blockchain. Whether blockchain exist or not, we need a decentralized currency to store value and make more trades possible. If this happens, people who invest and work for blockchain will fail and those invest and work for a good crypto currency will win.
VM is just one important aspect of blockchain. VM makes blockchain smart. So the blockchain can serve the crypto currency better, to support more use-cases of the currency. There are many other aspects we need to consider for a good currency. If AE do better in total, I invest in AE. If another currency do better, I choose the one better. It is simple.
But I still think those things;
Fee should be relative to payload to input into the block chain - something like cost per byte
Transactions should be the cheapest of the lot of operations - since those are supposed to be the main driver on the network
The micro block fee was too small or maybe the key block reward is too high
Because right now any transaction costs a lot more than it did before, for a legitimate fear but not enough evidence of the thing.
I see your point, but we all knew this since start. I figured out if I knew the payload size, and i knew i was able to put number of bytes * 50000000000000 that is how much data I would be able to write to the block chain with 1 AE, now I can only do bytes * 50000. but did anyone do it? I had the program to do it, i tried it, it worked, and i could upload a file as a proof of concept. and I did… in a private, separate network.
I still don’t see how this would spam the network ?
Yes, I know this, I still need to read more about this one too. O_O
Just go the check ADA, its fee is much higher than Aeternity. They know what they are doing. On-chain is for high value transfer and only high value data should be stored on-chain. All other transactions should be off-chain.
Which is why I said data size should be taxed, but not simple transactions.
Well, you didn’t post it to chain, but someone could. There would be an issue with 100TB of data on-chain.
The issue I also see is that we have one reference implementation. Hence we need to take more responsibility.
Still, mind, that protocol level min gas is 10^6, which is still a fraction of 1 AE (1 AE = 10^18).
The other one (10^9) is on the miner mempool side.
The taxation of the data is good idea. There can be exponential scheme etc.
This, tho, requires some specification. You can submit AE extension proposal.
Aeternity support about 100 transactions per second. In a 3 minutes’ block time, the max transaction number is 18k.
And the fee is about 0.00002. So the max transaction fee in a block is about 0.36 AE.
But the block reward is more than 400 AE. It is much higher than 0.36. So I think the fee need to be 100 times more than now.
I agree the fee is quite low still, but if demand or spam is a problem the market will move to higher fees, so I just want to make the point that there is some free market adjustment that could take place. But people are making good points about chain size and data concerns. Fascinating