Neo: Decrease Contract.Create, Contract.Migrate, Asset.Create and Asset.Renew by a factor of 5

[lerider]

Increased spam protection affect transaction costs, which in turn affect the attractiveness to deploy Smart Contract on NEO. Price exploring and project feedback support the conclusion that it is too expensive to deploy Smart Contracts on NEO.

This is a discussion to decrease Contract.Create, Contract.Migrate, Asset.Create and Asset.Renew fees by a factor of 5, as a follow up to enforcing tx fee in upcoming patch. The intention is to have higher circulation of GAS. (Decreasing fee by factor of X should increase number of new contracts by a factor higher than X, plus increasing invocations and transactions).

New prices would thus be:
Asset.Create (system asset) | 1000
Asset.Renew (system asset) [per year] | 1000
Contract.Create | 20 - 200
Contract.Migrate | 20 - 200

Note: This is a discussion and not to be misinterpreted as any form of consensus until sufficient feedback is collected in this GitHub issue.

[EdgeDLT]

Not directly related to your post, but since we are talking about a change to the pricing model that will have other repercussions, I think it's worth mentioning:

1. In regards to a higher circulation of GAS, where are we at in the discussion of distributing all GAS (include _tx_fee_) to NEO holders? Happy to see an enforced _tx_fee_ or something similar being proposed, but want to make sure we don't start incentivizing CNs. I think this needs to be considered prior to any changes.

2. Has any more thought gone in to distributing GAS only to addresses that vote? Think we should be considering this also in order to incentivize the use of NEO for governance. Just trying to get an idea for where all this GAS is going to go, and how we can use that distribution to more properly serve the network.

[thirdprize]

am on the verge of properly starting a NEO project for a game (http://www.starcardapp.com). I have started on the smart contract (it will be a fairly basic one) but I have an issue .

Initially I was planning on covering the running of the smart contract myself. If you are limiting yourself to people who already own NEO then you might as well not bother. Currently each operation on the SC would probably come in under the free 10 GAS so i could probably get away with it. I have read though that the free 10 GAS limit is going and we will have to pay all the GAS ourselves. To create my token, a checkWitness, a get and a put cost at least 1.3 GAS in total. To create a minimum 10,000 of my tokens (I would need much more) would require 13K GAS or £64K (or 90,000 NEO worth $1,710,000 to be self sufficient). 1 GAS (£5) to trade a card? There is no point me starting now if somewhere down the line it becomes too expensive to run.

As you can tell, I am a one man band, not a huge corporation. Is NEO really just for the big corporations?

[erikzhang]

If the free 10 gas is cancelled, then the cost of all operations will be greatly reduced. See #286.

[thirdprize]

I guess everything developed so far has tried to stay within the 10 GAS limit. Even if the Gas is cheaper, it will still be much more than tbey had to pay before.

How about just distributing gas to addresses registered to active contracts. You use it, you get more. Why does someone who brought 10 Neo as an investment need it?

[igormcoelho]

@lerider I would love to see prices fall quickly, to have more contracts on the network, but I think we have the oportunity to fit this "perfectly" in the global economic model. I mean, what is the expected revenue from deploy services, and how does it impact the quality of the services? If we have these numbers we could guess an appropriate value, that could even be auto-reajusted in the future... For example, more contracts deployed the price rises automatically, the less, it falls. It could be a way to achieve this 5x factor and to allow it to go even lower or higher, depending on demands. I think the same could apply to the global fees, I would love to see any reasonable and self-adapting formula backing up the economics here.

[thirdprize]

@igormcoelho as a dev I'd rather have a stable pricing structure. It is good to know how much your next update costs ahead of time. If the price of a contract update suddenly doubles you could be stuck.

[lerider]

May we adjust the fees after the issue below is solved?

https://github.com/neo-project/neo-plugins/pull/10

[igormcoelho]

Agreed Lerider! +1

[jeroenptrs]

I will reiterate what I mentioned on Discord: deploy prices for contracts on Ontology start at 10 ONG, which at current rate is 10 USD. Even deploying a storage-less contract on NEO costs more than 50 times as much.

I really want NEO to be stay the number 1 platform for NEO Contracts so I'm open to aid in this discussion, because surely this difference will attract more and more developers to deploy their contract on Ont and not on NEO.

[thirdprize]

@jeroenptrs how much is smart contract execution in Ontology compared to Neo?

[jeroenptrs]

@thirdprize you'd have to ask in the Ont Discord, I saw the deploy price mentioned above posted by an Ont team member on discord

[deanpress]

As @jeroenptrs said, deploying a NEOVM smart contract is much cheaper on Ontology than NEO right now. Any developer will compare platforms and can decide to release their "NEO" smart contract on the cheaper platform, which at the moment is Ontology.

Every day that this issue is not tackled means more developers flocking away from NEO, towards what has essentially become NEO's main competitor (a public blockchain platform using the same VM, competing in system fees and ecosystem development).

It makes zero sense that a competitor to NEO is becoming more efficient for deploying NEOVM smart contracts than NEO itself.

[WyattMufson]

We really do need to see the deployment GAS requirement fall. If it's only $10 on Ontology then it needs to be at most $10 on NEO. Doesn't make sense for another blockchain to be cheaper to deploy NEO smart contracts.

That being said, it is worth noting that ONG is only listed for sale with two trading pairs (two exchanges) on Coinmarketcap while GAS has 34 pairs (16 exchanges) - and so it is easier to actually buy GAS than ONG.

[deanpress]

@WyattMufson Many devs are willing to jump through some exchange-hoops if it means saving thousands on deploying a smart contract.

[WyattMufson]

@deanpress well certainly. I didn’t mean that developers would use GAS just because it’s easier to buy. Merely mentioning that ONG is hard to buy.

At the very least, the price of GAS and complexity of buying ONG could make developers use a different platform all together. There’s definitely no reason to make deploying NEO contracts on NEO more expensive than on Ontology.

[deanpress]

@WyattMufson Not to mention that 10 ONG is generated relatively quickly if you hold the USD amount you'd spent on GAS (for deploying your contract) in ONT instead (500 GAS = 1,500 ONT = 10 ONG in 2 weeks).

[WyattMufson]

@deanpress that's really interesting, I didn't realize that.

If Ontology contract deployment begins at 10 ONG (around $10) then should NEO contract deployment begin around $10 too (so about 2 GAS)? So maybe Contract.Create should be on the scale of 2 - 20 GAS depending on storage use etc? Do people agree that NEO contract deployment should be similarly priced to Ontology?

I think it's also worth noting that Ontology lacks the 10 free GAS and requires 0.01 ONG on all transactions, so it would make sense for NEO to have a somewhat larger upfront cost than Ontology since it lacks that fixed cost. What if Contract.Create started at 10 GAS ($50~)?

[lock9]

I'm closing this because I believe that these prices can be changed using policy changes. I will close this issue because of that, and because there is no activity for some long time. Please reopen it if this is a mistake.
Thanks