not sure how related the topic of gasless txs is related to this topic
Rather than jumping through the hoops proposed in the first post (sorry, @cwgoes!) I started to wonder why Namada has any transaction fees at all. Looks like an XY problem to me: “what are we going to do with the collected fees” versus “why are there fees?”.
- The current gas costs were picked rather arbitrarily, neither out of concrete and urgent necessity to stop and prevent spam, nor to cover infrastructure and downstream costs.
- To make IBC’ing into Namada attractive, we agreed to initially delay making gas fees in non-NAM tokens more expensive, again supporting the argument that fees are arbitrary.
- Transaction fees are not expected to cover the cost of infrastructure. Providing infrastructure is considered an altruistic act.
- Paying transaction fees for Shielded Transactions can be a risk of leaking information and the correct way to do it through a disposable gas payer is a rather coarse workaround that may bloat the chain.
So, what was the rationale behind transactions fees in Namada? Is it just inherited from Cosmos, and further back from Ethereum (why does Ethereum PoS have gas?) and Bitcoin?
There are completely gasless blockchains out there and apparently they are successfully able to prevent spam attacks. Ethereum Gas Station is not truly gasless, someone else is footing the bill, but clearly it addresses a need, so even Ethereum is rethinking gas now.