What do you guys think about enforcing fees with 2 significant digits in seraphis (the fee PR #7819 only makes it a convention)? This removes a convention (room for fingerprinting) and lets fees always be 2 bytes via scientific notation (conveniently, it can even be serialized as a varint to 2 bytes since the msb of both bytes will be unused).

ArticMine: ^

The fewer significant digits, the more arbitrary the priority of a given tx compared to other txes in the pool, since miners will use fee/byte as a yardstick.

I don't mean that as an argument against really, it might be something really minor.

Thinking about it, it might mean that in times of pressure, a tx that scores low on fee/byte due to the quantization effect would always be left to wait, regardless of its age.

Transactions with low fee/byte will be always be left to wait. Quantizing fees will just rearrange the marginal txs at the bottom slightly.

I do see an issue with this

Sorry do NOT see an issue with this

The only thing in consensus here is the number of significant figures, not the amount, so no problem

what prevents us from making fee values a part of consensus? fee per byte is already calculated on the node and is a part of consensus, so tx fee can just store a multiplicator of the default fee - 1 byte should be enough for this

Fees are ddos protection for the network. I think that's why minimum fees are left to the discretion of nodes (if the algorithm is bad and a hard fork isn't available, nodes can change min fees).

The fee depends on the previous block sizes. Since a tx isn't mined instantaneously, it'd change while the tx is waiting in the txpool, which it cannot since it'd cause the outputs' values to change, and thus break the signatures.

hmm, I always though tx fees were checked when checking blocks but nope. They're only checked when adding tx to mempool

moneromooo: good point

So some miner could mine transactions with literally zero fee? For example pool mining its own payouts

yes

One major problem with making fees part of consensus is that this encourages miners to collect or refund fees via a website. Very bad for privacy

There are many more issues with this