Fees

Blurt recently implemented fees to stop spam.

Blurt's fees flow to the blurt foundation because the people attacking Blurt did not like the Blurt Foundation, so we figured that for now, that would be better than burning them. I'm pretty sure that overall, there's consensus that burning fees is the right thing to do.

Blurt's default fees are:

• 0.05 BLURT per transaction flat-fee
• 0.01 BLURT per kilobyte

every transaction costs at least 0.05 + bandwidth.

Our developer, @baabeetaa, wanted to make fees a bit more adaptable and dynamic, however, and none of us three in the triumvirate felt right dictating fees. Because of that, the fees were made into witness parameters, which witnesses can set.

the flat-fee is a parameter known as: operation_flat_fee
the per-kb fee is a parameter known as: bandwidth_kbytes_fee

So, yeah, there are now fees for everything you do on Blurt: post, vote, transfer funds-- everything. And this has stopped the cock spam fully. If you stream the API of any graphene chain without fees, you're going to see a shocking amount of spam, and that's because transactions are free.

We don't really want to become a Great Big Garbage Patch For Data.

On Steem/Hive, witnesses subsidize the notion of "free" transactions. -- and in fact, that may happen on Blurt again one day, as well. But for now, we've built a framework for experimenting with fees.

How are we thinking about fees? Like this:

I'm also thinking about this like an anarchocapitalist.

Anatomy of the State

Witnesses provide storage and availability to blurt, and are paid by blurt for that. But load (transaction volume) can vary greatly from time to time. So now, they have the ability to determine fees on their own.

That's Tuan setting his witness parameters there.

flat_fee = "0.001 BLURT" to "100.000 BLURT"
bandwidth_kbytes_fee = ".** BLURT"

That's what witnesses get to choose now. For current witnesses, here is how you can begin setting fees on your node.

Setting Fees as a Witness

wget https://gitlab.com/blurt/blurt/-/jobs/634199115/artifacts/raw/build/programs/cli_wallet/cli_wallet
chmod +x cli_wallet
mv cli_wallet /usr/bin
cli_wallet
unlock yourwalletpassword 

Now that you're in the cli_wallet, steps be like:

import_key YOUR_BRAIN_WIF_KEY

then:

update_witness_properties "jacobgadikian" {"key":"BLT8StBSKPD9o9rKZaPkyaxkKZHjEqftTfUKrRshWKUqixRjsGhsJ", "account_creation_fee":"10.000 BLURT","maximum_block_size":65536,"account_subsidy_budget": 797, "account_subsidy_decay": 347321, "operation_flat_fee":"0.001 BLURT","bandwidth_kbytes_fee":"0.100 BLURT"} true

Remember that you'll need to change the username, public brain key, operation_flat_fee, and bandwidth_kbytes_fee, and remember that BLURT always has three decimals after the zero.

Strategy

There is not clear consensus on this point, but @baabeetaa and @megadrive have decided to give it a run, as have a few other witnesses. I think that it's best that there are fees on every transaction, because every transaction has a cost to the witnesses. However, I think that transactions vary in size, and therefore in cost, so they should be priced based on size.

I am personally advocating:

"operation_flat_fee":"0.001 BLURT","bandwidth_kbytes_fee":"0.100 BLURT"

This means that small transactions like votes will still be quite cheap, but posting 64kb of cock will be very expensive: 6.4 BLURT! Witnesses are free to adjust these settings as they please. The network will chose the median of them and charge users based on that.