ZIP: XXX
Title: Reduce default Shielded Transaction fee to 1000 zats
Owners: Aditya Bharadwaj <nighthawk24@gmail.com>
Original-Author: Aditya Bharadwaj
Status: Draft
Community Status: Request for comments : https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/zip-reduce-default-shielded-transaction-fee-to-1000-zats/37566
Category: Consensus
Created: 2020-10-11
License: MITThe key words "MUST", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "MAY", "RECOMMENDED", "OPTIONAL", and "REQUIRED" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.1
"Z" refers to shielded address. "T" refers to transparent address.
The term "default transaction fee" in this document is in reference to Z to Z transaction fee paid to miners on the Zcash network for the work on includning the shielded transaction in a block.
The goal of this ZIP is to discuss ideas around fee reduction, collect feedback from wallet developers, miners & Zcash users for consensus on reducing the default transaction fees and get the Zcash default transaction fee reduced from 10,000 zats to 1000 zats.
With reduced fees, it will be cheaper to transact on the Zcash network, while also inviting novel use cases for privacy preserving applications that would benefit from the Privacy, Security and Programmable Money aspects of the Zcash chain.
Out of Scope for this Proposal ============
Discussion around transaction fees for T to T, T to Z or Z to T.
The default transaction fee presently is 0.0001 ZEC or 10,000 zats. With ZEC market price of $100, a user can send 10,000 transactions for 1 ZEC, that turns out to 1 cent per transaction and it rises with the increase in the price of ZEC.
With increase in light wallet adoptions on mobile clients, many users will be new to the Zcash eco-system. And the fact that the transaction fees are paid by the sender (not the receiver) is new information to users who might use Zcash for e-commerce and app interactions that might result in several transactions each day.
Privacy must not cost a premium. The cost of 10 shielded transactions buys 1GB of mobile data in India today
Zcash users must be able to do more with their ZEC balance than worry about paying the premium for shielded transactions.
Requirements for consensus -------------------------
The change to the default transaction fees must be undertaken sooner as it gets difficult to gain consensus with the growth in the network of wallets, exchanges, miners and other parties involved.
The following parties need to be part of the consensus:
- The technical aspects of a lower default fee need to be evaluated.
* A guarantee from mining groups is required to include the lowered default fee transactions in the next block. * Wallet developers need to update the software to use the new fee. * Zcash documentation and community outreach must be undertaken to make the change known.
Security and privacy considerations -----------
Unique transaction fees can cause linkability within transactions, hence this change must be accepted by majority, if not all popular shielded transaction software providers before announcing the change
The current ZIP Editor is Aditya Bharadwaj, representing the Nighthawk Wallet. Additional Editors will be selected by consensus among the current Editors.
Comments from the community on the ZIP should occur on the Zcash Community Forum and the comment fields of the pull requests in any open ZIPs. Editors will use these sources to judge rough consensus.