I’ve been fully KYC’ed on Coinbase for many years. Not interested in having funds arbitrarily locked for months at a time because they believe they are protecting me from scams.

You are only proving my point.

The reason I bring up ATR is because it actually fixes a massive portion of the economic model of blockchain that makes it inefficient and unsustainable.

You can cast the pejorative “buzzword” on anything - what do you expect, new solutions won’t get new names? At some point you have to dig a little deeper than the fact that something has a name you haven’t heard of before.

Anyways, and to your point: blockchain can’t be expected to survive if the people who get paid for running it add zero value back into it. We say we are paying security, and we are, but that simply isn’t good enough. If you can’t pay security out of the same funds as infrastructure, then the infrastructure fails without central intervention and your objective security cost is pointless because you can find equivalent vectors on the monopolized infrastructure.

ATR takes money that used to go towards hoarding wealth or crunching numbers and forces nodes to hold data - all data, that should be on chain. It solves the problem you are keen to point out - that infrastructure will collapse even if the chain promotes itself as permanent. ATR gives you economic guarantees of what is only ideological in current chains.

If you’re not too sensitive to new terms, look into Saito. It solves the other problems of sustainability and infrastructure centralization (as an attack and monopolization vector – not to mention scale bottleneck).

Many protocols take the easy route and just say storage will get cheaper as more data is placed on-chain.

The problem is that this isn’t a market pricing mechanism - it’s developers forecasting prices and hard-coding variables based on those estimations. Not only does this put huge economic power and continuous reliance on developers, but it will never be as accurate as the free market.

When you start guessing prices instead of letting the market decide, you get problems on either side of the error. Over-price and users are paying nodes extra for no extra utility, under-price and nodes will not provide utility at all (unless centrally subsidized, like Infura is now).

The only way to get consistently low fees is the let the market price storage. Now when storage prices go down the cost for using the blockchain will immediately follow. Actually, it’s much better than that…

Because nodes are rewarded for storing data more efficiently, they actually earn profits they can use to research and develop even more efficient forms of storage - so they will be enhancing that trend instead of merely relying on it.

You don’t get any of this when you don’t pay nodes the market rate for storage and just hope that adoption will happen more slowly than storage technology happens to become cheaper.

Yes but if the promise of permanence doesn’t offset that cost then there is a fundamental problem somewhere: blockchain is supposed to be permanent, no?

If it’s expensive to store data, then this is a problem even for a blockchain’s normal everyday use. You are correct to generalize, I simply took the starting point OP suggested.

But it is a more general issue around pricing all storage. Automatic Transaction Rebroadcasting is a general solution - so when you zoom out and abstract away the single examples, it remains the only sustainable direction to keep fees low and let the blockchain survive forever without intervention.

It doesn’t matter if Eth price goes to the moon, the economic model is fundamentally flawed.

> Users start dumping data on-chain that must remain forever

> Eth price goes to the moon

Where in this equation are nodes being compensated for storing data? The fees that users pay to *add* data do not count – that’s a completely different cost than storing data. The nodes that join any time in the future are burdened **without payment** for all data that came before - the payment went to the nodes that added it and, apparently, Eth holders, if your solutions is ‘Eth price goes to moon.’

If your argument is that people won’t be able to add such data because it’s too expensive – just mete it out. Add it during low demand. It really doesn’t matter; nodes get paid to *add* data, nobody gets paid to *keep* data; at least they aren’t paid anything like a market rate. The solution now is just let fees increase to compensate the node cost, meaning new users pay for old uers - a truly awful economic model.

Anticipating the next argument: “the chain will just stay small enough so that storage costs decrease more quickly than archive costs.” You are now a slightly better version of small-block Bitcoin (same economic model: don’t allow arbitrary scaling) i.e. you have economic parameters set by developers and not the free market.

Automatic Transaction Rebroadcasting solves it. It gives you market prices for storage and pays that money to nodes actually storing it.

It poses an interesting question: What happens if everyone starts using Ethereum as a data archive service?

One interesting aspect of this, and this applies to most blockchains, is that you pay for the data a single time upfront but you expect it to remain there forever.

Does this make any sense to you at scale? Does this at all sound sustainable? Because it isn’t. It’s a tragedy of the commons problem. It can even get worse if a naive pricing mechanism is added for rent, where you rely on hardcoded parameters to gauge the price of storage in a fluctuating market.

You only solve this issue with a market mechanism, something fundamental. Automatic Transaction Rebroadcasting coupled with a finite ledger is a good solution: basically, all transactions have a set lifespan and at the end they must be rebroadcast, paying the average fee/byte new txs paid over their lifespan.

If you fund it well enough (or if it’s on Saito and your staking rewards offset your rent) you can have data that lasts forever on a chain with a sustainable economic model.

It might seem like a downgrade because you don’t get to pay once and live forever - but consider that paying once and living forever is a straight road to economic ruin and is simply pushing costs onto future users, thus continually removing users from the chain until it dies.

If you actually can pay for storage at a market rate, the chance that your data survives hundreds of years is far greater.