Poll: Should SAFE Network tokens have txcosts?

Features
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  • Yes
  • No
  • Depending on the project (Example: HighFrequencyTrading)
  • Undecided
0 voters

I haven’ t thought about this to much on the SAFE Network, because of SAFEcoin I foolishly assumed that transactions would be free for tokens as well. Honestly one of the dislikes for me personally regarding tokens is txcosts. Pardon my ignorance, but I assume that PUTs depend on SAFEcoins.

I’ve been looking for a platform where value can be transferred for free in this space forever and it’s laughable that bank2bank transfers are for free. Even Paypal is free person2person…

Thanks @Bacobob for starting the conversation and at @neo for answering and giving a better understanding.

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Why the farmers must work free for a private transfer of a private token?

Why the transfer value must be free and other services like communicating (email, IM, forum answer, VOIP, …) not?

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I voted yes to having transaction costs, although I’d ideally like Safecoin and other token transactions to be free.

I’d like Safecoin / other token transactions to be free as long as they aren’t negatively impacting the network’s performance.

However, I feel fee mechanisms would need to be in place to prevent transaction volumes becoming a problem for the network. If millions of ‘spam’ transactions were using resources & reducing the core network’s performance for data handling while generating no revenue for farmers, it would not be good for the network.

Maybe something similar to the rate limiter concept (for per-account ‘get’ limits) could be applied to per account token / safecoin transactions. If some accounts transact far above average, they would need to pay for the resources they’re using.

Hopefully the cost of a token transfer on Safe will be so low that either people won’t be bothered by the fee (e.g if it’s $0.0001 per transaction or something), and/or it’ll be easy for token issuers to fund all transactions of their tokens on behalf of holders (perhaps also with per-account limits on free transfers).

In the end, if something uses network resources and isn’t paid for, it won’t be providing the right incentives for those who contribute the required resources. If this is more than a small fraction of the network’s workload, it may become a problem.

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UMMMM

They have to

Why

Because if they had no cost then smart people would create all their MDs as tokens even though they are not really being used for that.

Duh 101 of gaming

Once you allow user created tokens (MDs) to be modified/transferred/created for free then people will simply call all their MDs as tokens even though they are not tokens at all. Hell I would even store all my smaller (<10MB) files as MDs rather than immutable to save on upload costs.

As @digipl & @DavidMc0 says we aren’t providing the network for free. And Spam attacks become trivial - create your own token then spam it to hell

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In theory transfers could be free while creating or modifying the data would not be free. Make all ownership transfers of any MD free basically.

Spam might still make this infeasible though.

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Not for international. And this is a global market we speak of here.

Wouldn’t creating also be required to be free to fit the tx costs being free since tokens can be created in order to be transferred depending on how they are made.

For instance a token system that has different denominations. So if I had a token worth 100 foobars and want to transfer 54.82 foobars to some one then I need to create 9 x 10 foobar tokens and 9 x 1 foobar tokens and 9 x 1/10 foobar tokens and 10 x 1/100 foobar tokens and destroy the 100 foobar token. Then send the required amount of tokens.

So in that example I needed to create 37 tokens in order to do the transfer.

Thus creation needs to be free too if we are to fulfill the general concept of free transfers. If it wasn’t then that excludes a range of tokens and thus limiting the concept.

Thus I can store files for free.

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I stupidly voted no because it didn’t register we weren’t talking about Safecoin. I think yes for tokens, no for Safecoin.

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Only for tokens that needs to be divided. There’s still plenty of tokens that wouldn’t really need to be divided though, for example tokens representing items in an MMORPG or tokens representing physical items, unless you want to transfer partial ownership of the item.

But yes, it does limit the concept and exclude a range of tokens.

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I just dropped in to this string, so maybe I’m missing something from other threads.

My understanding is that MD will have a cost (1PUT) to create, then free to modify, presumably including transfer.

I do see how this could allow spam, though. Is there discussion elsewhere about a mechanism for charging to mutate data?

Seems like adding a fee only when transfered could get complex.

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Your understanding is wrong. It was correct for SD objects, but because of the complexity and increased abilities the dev team decided that changes to MDs need to be charged. This is what happens in the alpha 2 network also

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There is a reason why bitcoin needs the lightning network, a reason why Storj went from bitcoin to Ether, a reason why the Yours project went from bitcoin to Litecoin to bitcoinCash, the reason is transactioncosts. Imagine needing dollars before you can send euros and pounds, because you need to pay for tansactioncosts in dollars. For us it’s normal to need bitcoin or Ether to send our tokens, the normal people out there who we want to use our tech, just won’t care about these nonsensical constructs that we call financial freedom. We are trapped to mine coins or hit an exchange to make a simple transfer (what a joke).

Kik is an chatapp with 15M monthly users, their token sale only brought over 10K people to the party, I’m sure that if the tech was easier to use that more people would have come to the party. Their biggest headache right now is how do they distribute their tokens among their millions of users, this also boils down to txcosts, it might even get them moving away from Ethereum in the future.

So just because banks, bitcoin, Ethereum etc charge a transaction fee we should do the same? Banks got the luxury to hold trillions of dollars, the only way you compete with that is free transactions free exchange (like circle.com). I’m a little puzzled that there is no word about tokens on the lightning network, but when somebody gets this idea and implement it, you might see tokens maybe moving from Ethereum back to bitcoin again.

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I thought the plan was to offer safecoin as free transactions? I figured a creative mechanism would be used to avoid spam, without having to resort to fees.

You just have to make it more expensive for the individual than the network. Expensive may not mean monetary fee, imo.

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Maybe we should experiment with free tokens, when Maidsafecoin is converted to SAFEcoin. If existing tokens like bitcoin, Ether etc can also be converted 1:1 to SAFE Network tokens, there will be no spam and a great testcase to see if the cryptocommunity would love to have tokens that they can send for free. Coins or tokens are just privatekeys, so basically information. :stuck_out_tongue:

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What kind of approaches do you suggest to prevent huge transaction volumes negatively impacting the network’s performance?

Free is fine, but something would need to be done to stop people making bots that spam millions of transactions per second that could render the safe network useless if measures weren’t put in place to protect against it.

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The Ether, LTC or BTH transactions are not free and neither the Lightning Network or Raiden ones. Safe Network will be able to offer fast and extremely cheap transactions. Pretending that they will be free, when it can seriously affect the operation of the network and generate a vector of attack, is risky and unintelligent.

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On a technical level I’m clueless how this can be solved, but it seems like an decentralized exchange that can exchange SAFE Network tokens directly to SAFEcoins (Shapeshift.io style) is the solution. So I would exchange all my Clikes for SAFEcoin so that I don’t have txcosts for future transaction. This would put SAFEcoin in the spotlight for the cheapo’s who want to keep it supercheap.

There are people/companies that own millions of Maidsafecoins, so they will be free to spam millions of transactions when SAFEcoin arrives. I would rather see the SAFE Network get spammed and improve instead of being carefull. We love the SAFE Network, so if it can handle tx at a moment we’ll just have to look for solutions.

452M SAFEcoins will hit the SAFE Network when it arrives so it will be put to the test if we like it or not, the most important thing is that we keep working to improve the SAFE Network and give it the love and care it needs. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Okay, I’ve had a chance to catch up a bit (not completely, by any means).

Why not just have any mutation of data cost 1 PUT, whatever it is. That builds in a transaction fee, accounts for the burden on computation and communication, and discourages frivolous sending of tokens around just to create traffic.

A PUT should be very cheap, but would be costly if trying to gang up on the network and overwhelm it.

There IS a cost of doing business of any sort to the SAFE Network. It is work for the network to serve up stored data, but the security and incentive models both require that part to be free. But if one is asserting some change to data, it costs a PUT, except in the case of safecoin (and perhaps it should apply there, too, since the “transaction fee” would be very, very small and the same as asserting any other change of data state).

By doing it that way, there is no discrimination between “financial” or other data-property transfer transactions and any other sort of PUT.

Asking the network to share the state of data as it exists == free for the asking.

Asking the network to change the state of data == 1 PUT. Simple, it seems.

The more I think about it, the more I think that this SHOULD also apply to safecoin, just as any other burden placed on the network to store or mutate data.

EDIT: So I’ve changed my vote from undecided to yes, with the proviso that I mean not “txcost” but universal PUT charge.

Additional thought: Applying this to safecoin would have an additional feature once safecoin gets so valuable that divisibility in required. Subdivisions would cost the same to transact as the whole safecoin. So as “safedime” would cost 10x PUTS to transact the same value. This itself would disincentivize fracturing whole coins to create spam. Not sure of the ins and outs, and a lot would depend on the divisibility mechanism, but food for thought.

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Just going with fees is pretty unimaginative.

Perhaps a safecoin could only move so quickly between owners, to prevent spammers firing them backwards and forwards? Maybe just a few minutes would be sufficient to prevent abuse.

Tbh, I haven’t given it extensive thought. However, just lumping on fees seems a bit defeatist. Maidsafe tend to like to do the hard and inventive, rather than the easy and commonplace! :slight_smile:

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I would prefer instant movement to 0.00001 cent

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Movement would be instant. You just wouldn’t be able to spend it until the cool off period was up.

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