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Conficux institute: an explanation of the mechanism of conficux proxy payment

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When designing the consensus protocol, we considered how to facilitate new users to experience blockchain, so that new users with account balance of 0 can also use the smart contract on the chain.

Title of the article: | of the institute of conficux
Source: Conflux Chinese community

There used to be a saying in Internet circles that "the dog pays the pig", meaning that Internet companies provide services to users for free while other market players pick up the bill. So is this true in the blockchain world? How to implement similar functions? This article is intended to introduce some of the exploration behind Conflux in this regard.

Sheep pig

Internet giants begging users to "flip the brand"

Today, people have been used to the Internet all kinds of "free lunch" : not only search, mail, map, network disk and other basic services can be free to use, and now even more and more games, music, movies and other resources have tended to be free.

There are many characteristics of the Internet economy, if the spread of three days, three nights can not finish. But without further discussion, we can also conclude that the biggest secret to gaining customers for Internet applications is to minimize the cost of using them, especially for new users who want to use them for the first time.

Internet companies to reduce the use of user cost can be said to be doing all they can very: the cost of server nature is afraid to ask (ali cloud and cloud services such as amazon AWS can not less money), the product is free to use the standard, such as hair red envelope nor fresh, there are some large "flow" even said (m m: I) serve (t not ng) communication operator for a particular application from traffic - not just the cost of the server, even together out of the user's mobile phone traffic fee, all kinds of giant racking their brains to allow the user to turn their "brand".

Similar traffic-free services are now common

On the other hand, Internet applications have made great efforts to reduce users' cognitive costs. A very classic case is that Google with only one search bar of the home page beat yahoo's big yellow pages, the perfect interpretation of "less is more". The popularity of mobile payments in recent years has a lot to do with the design of the products that make up the sweep payments, so it's easy to imagine a range of experiences using various banking apps. In the past few years, the explosion of Uber and other taxi apps was also based on intuitive electronic maps and mobile phone location. In the era of calling for a car, it was too troublesome to describe the address, and in most cases, people preferred to take their chances on the roadside.

It's not easy to say I love you

Compared with Internet applications, the current user experience of blockchain services and decentralized applications can be described as "atrocity", especially for first-time users, the threshold is sky high. The "cognitive cost" is a combination of the economic and the more daunting steps.

For first-time users of blockchain, they first need to understand some basic cryptography knowledge and blockchain principle, plus the difficulty of users to manage the account address and key, which makes a large number of ordinary users shy away from blockchain. After getting used to the basics, congratulations, you're about to hit one of the biggest roadblocks -- paying transaction fees.

Everything a user does on the blockchain, whether it's transferring money or invoking a smart contract, starts a transaction and is then packaged and executed by the miners. Of course, the miners are not lei feng. They won't work for free. So users who want their deals to take effect must pay the miners to package and execute them. Typically, this fee is paid from the user account that initiated the transaction, and the more complex the contract, the higher the fee. On ethereum, for example, each interaction with a decentralized application costs a few yuan, and when the network is congested, the fee can soar to tens of yuan, which is unacceptable.

From the traditional "who USES who pays" point of view, it is a natural and reasonable design for users to pay the transaction fee, and the handling fee is also paid by the initiator when we transfer through the bank. But from the point of view of the Internet economy, this payment model simply makes no sense.

For example, if you use a computer to log into a website, the website is set up on the server of aliyun, then a page of alipay pops up, requiring you to register for alipay and pay a dime for the server's electricity and traffic fee, then the website should be half cold. After a series of operations such as the completion of alipay's registration and recharge payment, may be because a picture or video displayed on the site actually exists on tencent cloud, and pop up a WeChat payment page also want to register and pay... By this point, I'm sure the site is pretty cool.

However, the above tedious pattern is the actual level of blockchain economy. Users must first create and top up accounts on the corresponding chain before using the blockchain service for the first time, and the process often involves cumbersome and less reliable off-exchange transactions. Too long an operation costs a lot of overhead, and at every step it loses potential users. Moreover, the model of paying for every operation on the blockchain goes against the user's psychology and usage habits -- the pain caused by multiple micro-payments often far exceeds the amount actually paid.

As a result, the various decentralized applications on the blockchain are difficult to attract new users from "outside the circle", often having to compete for existing blockchain accounts and existing users holding digital currency. The reality that only coin holders can use blockchain service makes decentralized application become a game within a small circle to a large extent, which greatly limits the development of blockchain economy and is not conducive to realizing the ideal of universal benefits of blockchain.

"Shield" - & gt; "C"

Attracting new users is not just a matter of blockchain and decentralised apps. Internet companies in recent years, the cost of acquiring customers is also rising. According to the financial report, in 2018, the customer acquisition cost of jingdong reached 1,503 yuan, while that of ali reached 390 yuan. Compared with pinduoduo, the customer acquisition cost of pinduoduo only 77 yuan is undoubtedly an important factor for its rapid development. Other Internet giants according to ARPU different customer acquisition costs are generally more than 100 yuan, Internet finance can even as high as two or three thousand yuan.

Naturally, developers and operators of decentralized applications are not naive enough to think that they can attract users by faith. Nowadays, it is urgent to improve user experience by optimizing the interface, simplifying the operation process and other means.

How to properly subsidize users on top of the existing blockchain infrastructure is also a matter of science: the simplest way to do this is to send tokens directly to users via airdrop, but this will inevitably attract a large number of "wool pulling" robots. Although the mode of reimbursing transaction fees to users can avoid wool party pulling bald, it cannot reduce the cognitive cost of users' first use.

At present, the contract wallet is the most friendly on the market for first-time users of blockchain. Argent purse on the etheric fang, for example, EOS Mykey purse, can help users to get rid of "private key", "mnemonic" and "commission" killer cells, through integrated interface wallet in depth and the Compound of the chain block and Kyber DeFi (decentralized financial) application interaction, and by the Argent/Mykey company bear the fees of these interactions produce.

On the other hand, the contract wallet not only integrates specific applications, but also restricts users' free access to various smart contracts, making the "smart wallet" no longer smart. In case of congestion, the opaque transaction processing mechanism of contract wallet also reduces the user's ability to control the transaction. For example, on March 13, when ethereum rates shot up, Argent set the rates so low for one transaction that it blocked subsequent transactions through the account. In addition, trading through a contract wallet is one more step than trading directly through a regular wallet, so it is more expensive and costly, further reducing the efficiency of the entire network. More importantly, the DApp supported by the contract wallet is also very limited. If users want to use more DApp, they can only export the private key by themselves, which is very tedious.

"Does the wool really come out of the pig?!"Conflux proxy payment mechanism

With all that said, how does Conflux solve this problem? In addition to improving throughput and validation speed and reducing usage costs for all users, conficux designed the consensus protocol to facilitate the new user experience of blockchain, particularly by enabling new users with zero account balance to use the smart contracts on the chain. We believe it is crucial to attract new users and get more people interested and motivated to experience blockchain by eliminating the step of having to change the account balance from zero to one before initiating a transaction.

There is no doubt that the sender cannot pay the miner for transactions from accounts with a balance of 0, so someone must pay the miner for those transactions to be willing to package them. Hence, at the protocol level, Conflux designed a Sponsor mechanism that pays transaction fees for transactions that invoke smart contracts, allowing accounts with zero balance to invoke smart contracts directly.

In Conflux, the sponsorship of each smart contract (with respect to transaction fees) can be described by the following parameters:

· Sponsor: records the provider of the current sponsorship;

· Sponsor balance: the balance of current sponsorship funds is recorded;

· Sponsor limit per transaction: this is the maximum amount the Sponsor is willing to Sponsor per transaction;

· Whitelist: this list records the list of accounts that the contract is willing to fund, and can also be set to fund all accounts.

If user A initiates A transaction using contract C, and A is on C's white list of recipients, and the transaction fee does not exceed the sponsorship balance of contract C and the maximum amount of funding for A single transaction, the transaction fee will be derived from the sponsorship of contract C, not from the account balance of A (regardless of the balance of A). So when faced with such a deal, the miner simply checks whether the contract C being invoked is willing and able to pay for the deal to be packaged or not.

Both the whitelist and the cap on the amount of money awarded for a single deal are restrictions designed to ensure that sponsorship money is not abused. The whitelist can only be modified by the contract itself and is primarily used to manage the scope that the contract is free of charge, for example it can be set to be free of charge only to registered users who have been authenticated. Capping the amount of money that can be awarded for a single deal reduces the risk of waste and collusion with miners to extract sponsorship money.

Sponsorship and sponsorship money are managed in a more open way: anyone who wants to pay can become a new sponsor. Users can donate a sponsorship gold to any agreement statement may provide funding cap for each transaction, as long as give money more than the contract of the current sponsor golden balance and single trading limit does not reduce, the sponsors will be replaced with a new gold before the Lord - the money balance will be returned to the original road a sponsor. The cap on the grant amount for a single transaction can be reduced only if the current grant balance is already less than the cap for a single transaction.

New users with an account balance of 0 can also directly initiate a smart contract on the transaction call chain, as long as someone has deposited money for the contract in advance, through the contract transaction payment sponsor mechanism. Developers of decentralised apps on the blockchain can use the mechanism to facilitate their users, and the Conflux eco-fund subsidises developers through transaction fees for sponsorship contracts.

The advantage is that users in the use of block chain services and applications, you can completely ignore the existence of digital currency, even if the user does not hold any digital currency, can still experience in Conflux network block chain application of open source, protect privacy, the experience in this aspect won the same as we are familiar with the Internet application experience.

Conflux, as the next generation of underlying blockchain infrastructure, hopes to truly enable open, decentralized businesses in the future. To achieve this goal, Conflux not only made a qualitative leap from other projects in terms of performance metrics such as blockchain throughput and validation speed. More importantly, Conflux hopes to truly build a "usable and usable" blockchain ecosystem by working with its ecosystem partners. In this ecology, no matter "geeks, technology masters" or "novices, little white" can find their own world, so that blockchain is no longer the toy of a few people, truly achieve "universal benefits", so that everyone can feel the changes brought by blockchain to life.

Source link:weixin.qq.com

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