Currently a wallet is 1 Mina, some Community members have commented this be off putting for smaller investors, especially if the price of MINA rises. Could this price be looked at in the future?
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I totally agree. Perhaps 0.25 MINA for wallet creation will be a more reasonable fee in the near future. It will also allow more users to potentially move their funds away from centralized exchanged onto their personal wallets and maybe even encourage staking via decentralized staking pools instead of a centralized exchange staking service,
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The inital fee set as 1 Mina was to limit account creation since the protocol only supported ~100k accounts iirc. Now the protocol has upgraded to support >300k or perhaps more, should charge considerably lower or nothing at all imho.
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Is there a risk that if it was free to create a wallet then someone/thing could cause problems by creating millions of them?
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@Pete Yeah that was what originally we were trying to control for. So I’d think its probably best if not free, but I would support making it lower given all the things pointed out in this thread. 0.25 seems like a good number for it (and coincidentally a number that’s come up in other discussions I’ve had on it too).
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It’s surprising how much the price of a wallet comes up in discussions I’ve read on other channels. I was wondering, could we use this as a basis for a test of a first community vote? (once we have worked out the way to do that )
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I actually worry that it is too cheap to create an account. The larger the ledger, the slower things get currently - making accounts (I think) the most operationally expensive part of the protocol. I think it is fitting that they are also the most financially expensive part of the network (certainly relative to snarks, transaction fees, etc.) What is the value of having really cheap account creation? Why is it helpful, and who is it helping? Is that good for the protocol?
It is a one-time fee, there is permanent overhead to the protocol for carrying that account forever. It is the only Mina real estate currently (no other state storage) and I don’t see the value of cheapening it.
All of that said, whether it is 1 MINA, or 0.25, or 10, seems rather arbitrary. Perhaps there should be an equation that governs this - although I’ve not thought about what it should be based on.
Perhaps it should be based on the fill rate of the account limit, although that would presumably start a land-rush that would hurt the protocol (people just buying up accounts before they get more expensive.) Perhaps it should be based on average volumes or fees or something else - not sure…
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An alternate (longer term) solution would be some form of state expiry rather than the pay once model currently in use. Good notes on the concept in Ethereum here: A state expiry and statelessness roadmap - HackMD
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I don’t have an issue with it going down or up considering the majority of the wallets actually created by exchanges I don’t see 1 to 0.25 change going to matter much since it’s only a one-time fee. Even if it’s much expensive in the future it can still be reasonable. My issue is mina is very new and crypto is volatile when you take a loan over defi platform you had a lot of volatility margin from 1 to 0.25 drop is not that significant margin. Since change is also going to probably take time require a fork and going to stay for a long period any price drop can also make it very cheap and cause issues. Also if we just check staking numbers real user wallet number is most likely under 10k while our wallet number is at 78k.
Personally I would like to see wallet creation to be as simple as possible and I am wondering that if the price of Mina reaches eg $10 or $20 will some smaller buyers think twice about creating a wallet and that this could prevent them becoming engaged with the project?
I am just brainstorming, but maybe there could be some kind of rule that whenever there is a hard fork the price of the wallet is considered and this could be something that is voted for (eg keep the same increase to X or decrease to y?) based on the current conditions of that time?
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Since we are just talking about account balances not more complex state, I expect the rule would have to be based on 0 balance for a period of time would cause a wallet to be evicted from the ledger. But even that simple rule would require additional state in the ledger - I don’t think we can tell the last time a balance was updated from the ledger alone.
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How’s about instead of charging the address creation fee, we can change it to the minimum mina requirement for an address to be active?
For example, ​Min mina = 1
- Any wallet needs to have at least 1 mina to send/receive mina. It means that for a brand new address, we have to receive an amount of mina >= 1 mina if not, reject it.
- If the balance >=1 mina, you have 2 options to send mina out of wallet:
- Send all of the balance to deactivate that wallet address.
- Send a part of the balance so that the remaining balance >= 1 mina, if not, reject it.
Finally, users don’t lose their mina, it’s still in their pocket, we also have a mechanism to protect our ledger from spamming.
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Having it votable is good but I don’t think we can have that system at the current network state. Outside that, if you consider binance/okex/coinlist wallets not gonna join to this voting + some locked wallets from early investors probably not taking any action on these matters either. I don’t think we have health numbers to even make this system work on chain. That needs a lot of consideration and planning to work.
It is important to give new users the possibility to easily create their own wallet and participate in the network. When Mina was around 1$, a fee of 1 MINA was totally acceptable. Now, with Mina being around 5$ according to the current market conditions, I think it will slowly become and increasing hurdle for new investors - especially the ones who only can afford to invest small amount, for them it will become increasingly hard to become truly independent from big exchanges, considering that many exchanges don’t even support staking for their customers.
The only question that I still have is: Should the dev team invest time and resources to develop a mechanism that dynamically adjusts the wallet creation fee (according to whatever parameters) or will it be enough to simply manually adjust the fee down after the community had such a discussion?
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Exactly my thoughts, if someone is putting a decent % of their first small crypto investment into just creating a wallet, then a less serious project than MP that is doing X10 will become a more attractive proposition to them. Adoption and interest in the project can only be a positive thing as long as the infrastructure can handle it. My thoughts are to reduce to .25, something I’m told is a relatively straightforward thing to do @evan ? which along with the introduction of Snapps would creative a nice wave of positivity taking us into 2022 while in the meantime look at a way to manage this for the medium to long term.
Yep, it would be really easy to change the constant - I think anything more would take more time (and should probably be planned for the next hard fork if we do so)
We were actually originally (pre-launch) thinking on the minimum deposit lines as above, with the ability to “delete” or deactivate an account - but we realized it would take a bunch of time to implement, and there wouldn’t be that many accounts at first.
Re the long term solution too: Another component is if Snapps ever allow more data to be placed on the account, that will also be a place where there should perhaps be a cost to adding more data. We’ll probably need some long term solution if that becomes a thing (or just the number of accounts goes up a lot). I wonder if some kind of state rent could make sense for it, but I haven’t done much research on it yet
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ok, so I guess my question now is how do we escalate something from where there is a general consensus of agreement into something that is actioned / voted on?
Even though I got kicked out of Mina Protocol Telegram group a while ago, just for raising a question on this issue (in a very polite manner), here I must say again, it’s an overdue problem that needs to be addressed to. Just like the high gas fees are dragging newcomers away from Ethereum (also, imagine needing to burn 1 ETH every time you create a new wallet), the wallet creation cost of Mina Protocol is acting as a bottleneck in the process of developing the Mina community and telling “the little man” that he is not welcome to Mina.
Since it’s not (and, understandably, cannot be) an across-the-board type of ticket you could use in the Mina Protocol universe, every time you want to transfer your tokens to a new wallet (cold wallet, community wallet, exchange platforms, etc.), you have to burn 1 Mina token. Promoting Mina Protocol by referring to the low transaction costs doesn’t make sense to me while we have this issue in front of us.
I can see this method’s benefits and that it was actually the only way to go at the beginning, especially after reading Evan’s explanation here, but it has to be adjusted as the conditions evolve. In my opinion, the stronger the protocol gets, the lower the cost of new wallet creation should become.
We should remember that, by definition, a decentralised project needs a community around it. Here and there I see some, belittling retail investors and even arguing that it should cost higher to create a Mina wallet! Small investors might not always have a huge impact on the tokenomics (I believe they do) but what they bring to decentralised projects is something you cannot measure with money. The community is so essential, even some absolute joke tokens have become respect-worthy only because (somehow) they have a strong community developed around them. Forget the meme tokens. Bitcoin became a thing not because of some VC’s but because of a bunch of nerds who believed in it and kept it alive until the whole world woke up. Unlike the institutional investors, “little men” actually do a lot of work for you, completely free of charge.
In this industry, you simply cannot continue to exist without a sizeable number of people believing in you.
To those who have a huge stake in Mina Protocol, it might not matter whether the wallet creation cost is 1 token or 100 tokens but it definitely matters to retail investors, especially so should the token price increase. I simply cannot imagine a person with a $50 budget to invest, accepting a %10 instant loss (with today’s numbers) and choosing Mina Protocol over others. Should Mina token’s price hit $50, a person with $50 wouldn’t even be able to consider investing in Mina no matter how stupid that decision would be. It’s even worse for the citizens of the developing countries, as $50 means way more to them than it does to us.
I don’t know how strong the protocol is today. And if it cannot support more workload, keeping things as is might be imperative. But if Mina Protocol is now more capable than 9 months ago, that cost needs to be reduced.
I think I will even use this equation as a strength indicator from now on. Every time I see a smaller fraction of Mina needed to create a wallet, I will whisper “congrats on getting stronger, Mina.”
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I think mina wallet creation fee need to be reduced, now not so important but if prize goes up will be a problem.
About deactivating accounts, maybe could be a solution to recover the fee, but seems hard to code and in future could be a expensive recovery for the network.
I think it’s better to change the fee as prize moves, is it possible to make the fee fixed to a stable coin cost? Like 2 busd and convert to realtime mina cost in the creation of the wallet moment?
What is the official wallet? I can’t seem to find any info on it on the website…