Storage rent rationale and compendium

Storage rent, like incentivising relays as is the primary goal with Pocket, is essential for the sustainability of a blockchain. Without it, you get a tragedy of the commons, where storage is overutilized due to everyone free-riding it as a free public good, and consequently it becomes bloated, it then takes longer and longer to sync the chain, even as a warp sync, fast sync, etc. At the moment in Ethereum there are probably only a few archival nodes that store the whole state. While it is true that there probably will not be as much state to store in Pocket, as it is not a Turing complete smart contract generalised transaction ledger like Ethereum, there will be state to store: e.g. batches of relays, staking/unstaking, validators joining/leaving, etc.

Compendium:

Correct, if Pocket offered blockchain storage of relays. Currently as it exists, Pocket does not. It might be helpful to first create a post detailing why Pocket should offer storage of relays. When introducing a new feature to the network, consider both the pros and cons and describe them in detail.

I’ll add it to the to-do list to go into more detail, later, when time allows.

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I was assuming that Pocket would need to store some state, which would need some kind of pricing economics. More info on the rationale for pricing economics for blockchains can be found in the above compendium, particularly https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/papers/pricing/ethpricing.pdf.