This is great. Thanks @aiyadt for doing the hard work of starting the ZIP and shepherding the conversation forward!
There are a few considerations that I haven’t seen mentioned:
- checkpoints
- exchanges
- hardware wallets
Today, most light clients start from a checkpoint (birthday) and may not have all chain state available. Any solution that is a function of chain state must account for use-cases, such as hardware wallets, where that chain state is not available. Also, shielded withdrawals are now supported on Gemini. We just did a brown bag yesterday with their engineering team and the topic of fees came up. If we change the fee to some kind of complex, dynamic, future-proof solution, then it will have a non-trivial impact on what they’re building. We should definitely factor in their perspective before settling on anything.
This ZIP, as I understood it, is scoped to establishing a new “conventional” fee, rather than propose changes to the protocol or wallet fee mechanisms.
This is a key distinction to make. It sounds like there should be another ZIP, with a longer horizon, that moves us in the direction of something like EIP-1559 with innovative economics. Meanwhile, this ZIP can help us iterate toward a near term solution that could possibly even coincide with the Canopy activation.