When using a public chain, sending Bitcoin, or sending tokens on Ethereum, users need to pay a mining fee. This is different from when we use WeChat Pay and Alipay, which do not require a handling fee (strictly speaking, WeChat Pay charges merchants). How should the mining fee of a public chain be designed? We can analyze the mining fee design of public chains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum from four perspectives.
4Who provides the resources? 5. How does the design of mining fees help build a better network? Most public chains require users to pay mining fees to send transactions. Only a very small number of public chains use a zero-fee design, such as EOS. The design principles of Bitcoin's mining fees are: first, they are charged according to the number of bytes of the transaction sent by the user; second, the unit price of bytes generally has a minimum price principle, and then whoever offers the higher price will get faster confirmation based on market competition. The mining fee of Bitcoin is Bitcoin itself. The minimum transaction price per byte is usually set in the full node wallet, which is basically 1sat/byte. Although this is not a mandatory consensus rule for the entire network, if it is lower than the mining fee set by the full node, it is more likely to be rejected by the node. BTC, BCH and BSV, as well as most UTXO-based blockchain products, all use similar mining fee designs. Basically, the lowest byte price is 1 sat/byte. Because BCH and BSV have a small number of users, users basically pay mining fees at the lowest price, and there is no mining fee bidding ranking between users. BTC is widely used and will involve bidding ranking, which is generally 10 sat/byte now. Although the design of BTC’s mining fee is a little more complicated than BCH, BTC’s isolated witness transaction data is divided into witness data and basic transaction data, and the minimum byte price of the latter is three times that of the former. But we don’t need to care about these details. When sending token transactions on Bitcoin, Bitcoin is also consumed as mining fees. For example, when sending omni-usdt on the BTC network, the mining fee is also BTC; when sending SLP tokens on the BCH network, the mining fee is also BCH. The mining fee for token transactions is also measured by the number of bytes. The Bitcoin mining fee is ultimately collected by the miners. When the mining pool packages the block, it will collect the mining fee added by the user when sending the transaction into the coinbase transaction. Miners are also the main Bitcoin node operators. Bitcoin transactions require nodes to verify, broadcast, and store. So it can be said that the mining fee is paid by users to miners, and miners pay for the resources required for transactions. The design principles of Ethereum's mining fees are: first, fees are charged according to the calculation steps of the transaction sent by the user; second, each calculation step has a minimum unit price, and then priority is given to faster confirmation based on market bidding rankings. Ethereum's mining fee introduces an additional currency called gas. Gas and ether have a fixed exchange price in the system. Ethereum transactions involve a lot of contract codes and the like, which require computational execution. The design of gas takes into account the computational, storage, and bandwidth requirements of transactions. Simply sending ether requires executing the system contract, which involves relatively less gas. To send tokens on Ethereum, you need to execute the token contract, which requires paying more gas. On average, the mining fee for sending tokens is 1.5 times that of sending ETH. But whether it is issuing Ethereum or tokens, the Ethereum network uniformly calculates the mining fee based on gas. The gas value reflects the computing, storage and bandwidth requirements of the transaction. Because Ethereum is now used in large quantities, users need to bid for priority confirmation. Moreover, the design of Ethereum's mining fee is to collect mining fees first and then confirm. If you don't pay enough mining fees, you may not get confirmation, but the mining fees will be confiscated and the transaction will fail. This is very annoying. In contrast, Bitcoin transaction mining fees only reflect storage and bandwidth, which is calculated in bytes. Ethereum's mining fees are also collected by miners, who are the main operators of Ethereum nodes. It is also equivalent to the computing, bandwidth and storage resources required by miners for advance transactions in exchange for mining fees paid by users. The design of EOS’s mining fee shows BM’s design skills. Some people think it is good, while others think it is not. EOS transactions are precisely divided into CPU (computing steps), Net (bandwidth) and RAM (storage) according to the resources required by the exchange. CPU, Net and Ram can be regarded as three currencies, and have a certain exchange rate relationship with EOS. When a user sends a transaction, the system will plan the three resources required for the transaction and then calculate the price. However, the way EOS system sells these three resources is "leasing". Users first buy EOS, and then mortgage them into three system contracts in exchange for these three resources. CPU and Net have stable prices. You can redeem the corresponding amount of EOS in the future based on the amount of EOS you have mortgaged. However, Ram has a fluctuating price. You may get more or less when you redeem it. Because EOS is pledged to obtain the three resources needed to send transactions, but the pledge can be redeemed, EOS is called free of mining fees. This is a disguised form of free. Similarly, sending tokens on EOS requires more resources to execute additional contracts besides the system contract, so users need to pledge more EOS to obtain the right to use it. EOS mining fees are not paid to super nodes (miners) because it is a disguised form of free. But super nodes provide the resources required for transactions. Why do super nodes provide resources but do not charge mining fees? Because super nodes can obtain block rewards. Bitcoin and Ethereum miners receive dual rewards of both mining fees and block rewards. There is also a type of public chain where the mining fee is set as a fixed fee, and the mining fee bears a unique economic responsibility. The mining fee setting of the vsys public chain is fixed. To send the base currency vsys on the vsys public chain, users need to pay a fixed mining fee of 0.1vsys. To send tokens on vsys (such as IPX), they need to pay 0.3vsys as a mining fee. All mining fees on vsys are directly destroyed, which is equivalent to designing a deflation mechanism for the economic system of the entire network, and the beneficiaries are all coin holders in the entire network. vsys provides the computing, transmission and storage resources to execute transactions. It is the super node (miner) that does not receive mining fees, but does receive block rewards. Next, let’s think about how the design of mining fees can optimize system design. The mining fees of Bitcoin and Ethereum are ultimately collected by mining pools, so mining pools have the motivation to capture more transactions in order to obtain more mining fees. Mining pools capture user transactions by deploying more complete nodes around the world. This design is conducive to the timely processing of user transactions and is conducive to promoting mining pools to build better basic hardware networks. Bitcoin’s mining fee design is very simple, and the system design is relatively simple. Ethereum’s mining fee is too complicated, and there have been many incidents of using gas to attack the system. The design of EOS mining fee is very sophisticated, which is conducive to the system designer to show his strength. There are two major upgrades of EOS that are aimed at the pricing of RAM and CPU resources. The disguised "free" design also wastes a lot of EOS system resources. The EOS blockchain has now exceeded 600G, which is very large. Because super nodes cannot receive mining fees, they lose the motivation to build a better basic network by mining pools like Bitcoin and Ethereum. EOS mining fees are too complicated and make users uncomfortable. The design of vsys’ mining fee is the simplest, which is a fixed fee. The system design is relatively simple. The destruction mechanism of vsys’ mining fee has designed a deflation mechanism for the economic system, which is conducive to the price of the base currency to remain strong. Like EOS, because super nodes cannot receive mining fees, they have no motivation to expand and build a better hardware-based network. The mining fee of vsys is designed to be a fixed fee, without considering network resources; the mining fee design of Bitcoin considers storage resources more; the mining fee design of Ethereum is inclined towards computing resources; EOS divides resources into three types and prices them separately.
The main design purpose of the mining fee is to prevent traffic attacks such as DDOS. With the mining fee as a cost, a large number of attack transactions can be prevented from being sent to the blockchain. The more sophisticated the design, without considering the code quality, the fairer the transaction will be, the more it will optimize resource allocation, and the harder it will be for hackers to attack the network by constructing special transactions. Conversely, the rougher the design, the more likely it is that hackers will leave loopholes, and by constructing special transactions, they will spend a small amount of mining fees but achieve the purpose of greatly wasting system resources. But on the other hand, the more sophisticated the design, the higher the code quality requirements, and the greater the possibility of leaving bugs. It is difficult to have everything perfect throughout history. EOS and vsys are in competition with each other because super nodes cannot receive mining fees, but they have block rewards, which makes up for the lack of motivation for super nodes to expand the hardware-based network. If super nodes do not build a better network, they may lose user votes.
The lower the mining fee, or even free, the easier it is to attract users. This is also the reason why EOS has the highest real TPS.
We use a table to count the mining fee designs of the above four public chains |
