For some time now some or someone has been bloating Telos blockchain, possibly by purpose. This has been done by simply making a whole load of small transactions for each block.

Thing is, even if you send a bigger sum but it comes only from one wallet it takes only a small amount of space since the situation is basically the same as if you would be using pen and paper.

“One Million Euros from Pascal to TELOSNEWS.COM” doesn’t take much space from paper.

But:
“1 Telos to ZenH2O”
“1 Telos to Tybiboune”
“1 Telos to Lucky7”
“0.01 Telos to BitcoinBond_007 (he has enough Telos already)”

Takes much more space from paper, even moved sum was only 3.01 Telos (which will soon be more than the first examples Million Euros).

This same is also true for Blockchain. For every time someone sends Telos to some other address, there is always a mark of it. And if you own more than one address, you can keep sending Telos between your own addresses and Blockchain keeps bloating.

Actually, at the time of the last fork, Telos Blockchains’ size was about 4 Gb, now it is about 6 Gb. So it does matter.

To get rid of this most likely intentional bloater, there is now voting on Patreon with basically two options.

The first one is to increase the transaction fee. I’m actually not sure what is the current fee, but by a quick look at Explorer, it would seem to be something like 0.0001 Telos per Kb.

To use the pen and paper analogy, the more paper you need to use to write all the transactions, the more you need to pay since paper costs something for each line.

One transfer from one address to another takes roughly 0.25 Kb of blockchain space, and currently you would pay roughly 0.000025 Telos from it.

The first suggestion is to increase this fee somewhere from 1 – 10 Telos per Kb.

This would mean that transfer from one address to another would still usually be ridiculously cheap 0.25 to 2.5 Telos, which is nothing for a regular user who keeps sending bigger sums at once from one address to another.

However, for this bloater, who in one example block I checked from explorer where he made 2000 transactions with a total of about 100K Telos, this bloating would suddenly cost him about 500 – 5 000 Telos each block he does it. That is a 0.5 – 5 percent fee, and if he does that 20 – 200 times, he be out of Telos since all of that 100K Telos would have been burned and he couldn’t bloat the chain anymore.

The second option is to reduce Zero Fee Transfers. I have to say I am not entirely sure what that means, since I would imagine it simply means that each block has some certain amount of zero-fee transfers.

However, if this is the case, then I don’t really see how this would help against the bloater since as I mentioned, the example block I looked at had more than 2000 transactions. So even if there would be 100 zero-fee transactions currently, bloater is still willing to pay for the rest 1 900 transfer fee and it doesn’t seem to be a problem for him, and why would it with this low fee we currently have.

It was not mentioned how much time there is to vote, so better cast your vote sooner than later.