Update existential deposit in Polkadot
Polkadot existential deposit has been set to 1 DOT which made sense at the very beginning. However, with the sudden price spike in the last month (and it's reasonable to expect that the price can go even higher when the parachain auctions are launched) the deposit seems to be quite high. In my opinion, existential deposit should be some bare minimum (I would say no bigger than 5 USD) that will keep the account alive. In the current state of affairs, it's starting to become confusing for some members of the community because 1 DOT is becoming a substantial amount of money. So the purpose of this post is to discuss whether it makes sense to lower the existential deposit and what do new value should look like. I am looking forward to your opinions, thank you
Comments (13)
Comments (13)
Good point. Personally, I don't think that the price tag of a coin should affect the way one treats it. This is because you can never control price movements, but you are totally in control of the value you assign to a coin. If you really value the Polkadot ecosystem and want to take part in it at all time, you put your money where your mouth is by meeting the original existential deposit requirement. Changing the genesis parameters on the basis of price movements will only recreate the same wave of confusion that is rippling through the fiat system at this very moment. That said, the problem you pointed out is very common in most existing blockchain projects. Protocols have established ways to grow the pie, but the people behind the protocols still can't figure out how to share the pie beyond their little cliques of like-minded happy fews. I would say, if the people in the community aren't happy with this situation, why don't they submit a proposal for an airdrop of 1 DOT to all wallets in existence out there? If team Polkadot is serious about making its project accessible to the wider audience for the long run, they should walk their talk too. By design, DOT can never be a scarce resource within its own ecosystem; so they might as well use it to meet their own self-preservation goals.
Aidrop would defeat the purpose of the existential deposit which is to delete unused addresses from the blockchain to save space - so saving the addresses is not the right thing to do IMHO. So to keep the purpose, we have to think about wallets with less than 1 DOT as unused. Is the address with 0.9 DOT (say 16 USD at current prices) unused? I wouldn't say so. Also, what if DOT price is 50 USD, you would need 50 USD to open "DOT account" then, anything less would be consider unused and deleted from the blockchain. Do you see where I am heading with this? Other point is that some wallets don't implement this properly and they don't allow to withdraw less than the existential deposit - and this is becoming a substantial amount of money. So, while I agree that behaviour of the network shouldn't be dependent on the assets price, this can become a serious obstacle for comfortably using the network and that's why I started this discussion
Good point. Personally, I don't think that the price tag of a coin should affect the way one treats it. This is because you can never control price movements, but you are totally in control of the value you assign to a coin. If you really value the Polkadot ecosystem and want to take part in it at all time, you put your money where your mouth is by meeting the original existential deposit requirement. Changing the genesis parameters on the basis of price movements will only recreate the same wave of confusion that is rippling through the fiat system at this very moment. That said, the problem you pointed out is very common in most existing blockchain projects. Protocols have established ways to grow the pie, but the people behind the protocols still can't figure out how to share the pie beyond their little cliques of like-minded happy fews. I would say, if the people in the community aren't happy with this situation, why don't they submit a proposal for an airdrop of 1 DOT to all wallets in existence out there? If team Polkadot is serious about making its project accessible to the wider audience for the long run, they should walk their talk too. By design, DOT can never be a scarce resource within its own ecosystem; so they might as well use it to meet their own self-preservation goals.
Aidrop would defeat the purpose of the existential deposit which is to delete unused addresses from the blockchain to save space - so saving the addresses is not the right thing to do IMHO. So to keep the purpose, we have to think about wallets with less than 1 DOT as unused. Is the address with 0.9 DOT (say 16 USD at current prices) unused? I wouldn't say so. Also, what if DOT price is 50 USD, you would need 50 USD to open "DOT account" then, anything less would be consider unused and deleted from the blockchain. Do you see where I am heading with this? Other point is that some wallets don't implement this properly and they don't allow to withdraw less than the existential deposit - and this is becoming a substantial amount of money. So, while I agree that behaviour of the network shouldn't be dependent on the assets price, this can become a serious obstacle for comfortably using the network and that's why I started this discussion