How Much Should a Blockchain Cost? The Compelling Case for Higher Fees Posted on : Mar 21 - 2018

According to a group of researchers, cryptocurrency users are a bunch of freeloaders.

Well, maybe they wouldn't go that far, but they argue users aren't paying for certain data they should be paying for, and in turn, are putting the growth of blockchain networks at risk.

At least that's the finding put forth by a new paper that outlines a system for how higher fees could be charged based on the amount of data users need to store on a blockchain and the amount of time their data needs to be stored.

It's a controversial finding since rising transaction fees have set many cryptocurrency communities into infighting as various stakeholders debate the solutions for scaling blockchains and pushing fees down.

For instance, bitcoin's notorious scaling debate many times circled around growing transaction fees, which hit an average of $52 at their highest but have since fallen significantly to $1.30, according to BitInfoCharts.

Still, IOHK research fellow Alexander Chepurnoy believes part of the problem is that miners just don't have good ways of pricing their services accordingly.

Chepurnoy told CoinDesk:

"Miners are judging fees on bitcoin for bandwidth consumption, so for transaction size, and that's it. The idea of our research is we have few a different things we need to charge for."

Indeed, because of the way transaction fees are decided in most cryptocurrencies today, Chepurnoy said, users are incentivized to overuse some data, making blockchain full node software grow and become more cumbersome to spin up and run - which he argues is a bad thing, since full nodes are the most secure way to interact with the bitcoin network.

The pool of data tracking who owns which cryptocurrency is called "state," and this is the data the researchers propose users pay for. (State is typically stored in a special corner of computers called RAM, a type of storage that allows for the easy retrieval of the data, but it also makes that data more expensive to store.)

Blockchain states tend to grow larger and larger over the years as more people adopt these systems and use them more for transacting. Bitcoin's state, for example, has increased by about five times since 2014, while ethereum's is growing even faster.

But by slapping a fee on this data storage, Chepurnoy's hope is that users will be more cognizant of only storing what data is a must, in turn, shrinking the rate at which the state grows. View More