Bitcoin recently had a transaction paying almost 20 BTC which is roughly three times the base reward and most probably happened due to some mistake. Monero has a min-fee based on the base reward and dynamic block size, but does it also have a max fee to prevent such bugs or mistakes?
1 Answer
but does it also have a max fee to prevent such bugs or mistakes?
No, not at the protocol level. This is because it's not for the protocol to dictate how much (other than a minimum) a user wishes to pay in transaction fees.
However, the Monero GUI wallet (and potentially others), does add a warning when a user attempts to add an unusually high fee.
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I think the protocol does dictate other things like min-fee, ring size and also fee should be somehow limited to prevent bugs like this e.g. when using RPC from some other application.– janowitzCommented Sep 22, 2023 at 10:28
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min-fee gives spam protection, ring-size gives uniformity; hence both part of the protocol. A max-fee imposed by the protocol would be simply to protect user mistyping or poor wallet dev. If a user wishes to pay a large fee to miners, why should the protocol disallow? or who gets to even decide on what level that should be set to? Reasons it's not for the protocol. Commented Sep 22, 2023 at 17:01
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Right, fees anyway can destroy uniformity when a wallet is misconfigured e.g. to a fixed unique fee per byte. However I can imagine an attack vector when tx fees in one block are let's say x1,000 of base reward, it would incentive to spin up countless cloud instances (which normally would be not profitable) to find an own block and subsequent ones to make the original one orphaned and pocket the exorbitant fee - leading to a bigger reorg than usually use to happen.– janowitzCommented Sep 25, 2023 at 10:56