[Proposal] Increase min gas price

[ilblackdragon]

Currently:

• Transaction fees: 5N for 1M basic function call transactions (~4 Tg) => which mean full block of 1000Tg will be 0.00125N
• Storage fees: 1N for 10kb => average contracts 300kb that requires 30N

The suggestion to:

• Transaction fees: get full block fees to be 0.1 N by increasing min gas price to 100,000,000 attoN
• Reduce storage fee by 10x: 100kb for 1N => making average contracts 3N

Reasoning: storage right now ends up being very expensive for contracts like multsig and we want to reduce it to manageable. Tx fees are way too low at this point and we should leave more room to reduce it later.

[MaksymZavershynskyi]

The reasoning behind block cost in NEAR being too low is not clear. Isn't it our intention to have low fees, what is the reason for increasing it?

We should compute the lower bound on storage cost, but deriving the cost of maintaining EC on AWS for one year and use our inflation rate to connect it with NEAR. If the proposed storage fee is lower than that then we cannot decrease it.

[bowenwang1996]

@ilblackdragon then you are assuming that 1 shard = 100 TB storage, which seems ridiculous.

[SkidanovAlex]

I don't have strong preference for storage (naturally most of NEAR will not be used for storage, and attempting to obuse it will be pretty expensive).

For gas fees an insight into why you want to change it would be helpful :)

[eriktrautman]

Do you have comparable numbers for AWS on one side and ETH on the other for both storage and tx's for reference? Can't find the post and the economics blog doesn't have hard numbers.

[ilblackdragon]

Current prices are 40-70 GWei
Current ETH price ~$240

Ethereum:

• Transfer tx: 21,000 gas. 0.00084 - 0.00147 ETH. $0.2 - $0.35
• Storage price (spent): 6,400,000 gas per 10 kb. 0.256 - 0.448 ETH. $61.44 - $107.52

One major point is that contracts on Ethereum are only max 24KB with usually way smaller. Our contracts average at 300kb and sometimes go to 1MB.

Our simple transfer: 446 Ggas. Current gas price is 100,000 yN -> 0.0000000446 N (https://explorer.near.org/transactions/AbVHgMH85zTVKZGNY2VhG55apWhVMdbMrC8YbB4M1ibk)
I suggest we bump it to 100,000,000 yN -> 0.0000446 N
At current price: $0.00001784, if price increases 100x: $0.001784

Reasoning for min gas price increase is mostly around few things:

• It's still dramatically cheaper, being 10,000x cheaper and NEAR can grow 100x and it still will be 100x cheaper than Ethereum.
• We can always decrease but won't be able to increase it later IMO
• 0.1N per full chunk has a nice effect that ~15 shards would be almost covering the 5% of security issuance. Currently it's 0.0001N per full chunk - which would require 15k shards...

[SkidanovAlex]

Re: gas prices, agree with all the points except "We can always decrease but won't be able to increase it later IMO", I don't think there's anything specific that prevents us from later bumping the minimum gas price.

This sounds like a very strong reason in support of this idea:

0.1N per full chunk has a nice effect that ~15 shards would be almost covering the 5% of security issuance. Currently it's 0.0001N per full chunk - which would require 15k shards...

Storage should be extracted into a separate issue, so that we can discuss each issue separately.

[ilblackdragon]

anything specific that prevents us from later bumping the minimum gas price

We can indeed increase if we are ok with some applications breaking.
For example we have allowances, where apps created with expectation to allow 5-10 transaction.
If we increase price later, these allowances may not be enough even to cover 1 tx.
Or some contracts that were balancing usage of gas and amount on the balance based on the pricing.

[SkidanovAlex]

If we increase price later, these allowances may not be enough even to cover 1 tx.

What happens if the gas price increases to that level organically via usage?

[vgrichina]

@SkidanovAlex aren't we always pre-charging according to max price and then refunding (after #67)? Maybe I'm misunderstanding how that works though.

[bowenwang1996]

@vgrichina it is not according to max price but rather some pessimistic gas price computed from current gas price.