On the topic of payments being implemented within Autonomi (rather than a separate layer like I suggested in my previous post)…
If the goal is to reduce transaction fees that are paid for storage (i.e. via Arbitrum One), Autonomi’s current implementation of data types and payments make this a task that I think isn’t yet feasible.
I may be assuming too much about there being a goal of data payments being handled by a community token. Then again, if transaction fees are not a concern that the community token is intended to solve for, I’m unsure of what benefit there would be verses using ERC-20 (or other EVM-compatible tokens/contracts).
Receipts should one day be implemented by the Autonomi team (the documentation briefly refers to it, saying “Work in progress…”), which I think should unlock possibilities. However, I don’t know how soon that day will come.
For now, documentation indicates that GraphEntry is immutable. So I think to write a GraphEntry requires an Arbitrum (or other RPC-blockchain) transaction every time. And of course, Autonomi’s existing code for node payments would have to be modified so that nodes would recognize that they are getting paid using the new scheme (so they allow data to be hosted). Since the project has been embraced with Impossible Futures, maybe pull requests for code changes to Autonomi’s implementation would be prioritized, collaborated with and merged/released in a timely fashion.
I’m also hesitant about how adequate GraphEntry traversal performance will be, as the length of GraphEntry chains continues to increase over time (after all, double-spending needs to be checked for and prevented, etc). I try to think along the lines of “would the solution I’m thinking about be able to handle millions/billions of users everyday?” and at least for now, I’m not seeing it happening soon with today’s Autonomi implementations.
Then again, maybe (hopefully) I’m wrong - this may have been considered already. In any case, I definitely would like a way for Autonomi clients to not pay so much more for Arbitrum transaction fees compared to ANT paid to node operators (my understanding is the value is currently on the order of a million-to-one and has been since TGE).