The purpose of this post is to measure support for proceeding with an adjustment of Kusama's fees proposed by Shawn Tabrizi.

Problem

Once upon a time, fees and deposit requirements in Kusama were calibrated to map to a fiat-world equivalent - USD concretely - thereby loosely tracking operating costs incurred on infrastructure providers such as validators. Since the last calibration of the USD conversion rate, Kusama's USD exchange rate has increased over 70-fold, and the hard-coded exchange rate of 6 USD/KSM is thus wildly anachronistic.

Proposed solution

This pull request by Shawn Tabrizi adjusts the hardcoded exchange rate to 300 USD/KSM, thereby reducing Kusama's fees by a factor of 50. The directly affected parameters are documented here: https://hackmd.io/@Lederstrumpf/kusama-usd-based-parameters.

This 300 USD/KSM figure is already too low for today's rate of ~ 440 USD/KSM, but the market is also volatile, and thus it's likely prudent to stick with the 300 USD/KSM figure for now.

Likewise, the values of individual parameters listed in https://hackmd.io/@Lederstrumpf/kusama-usd-based-parameters should be re-examined and substantiated. However, such a discussion is complicated (appropriate parameter choices are at best difficult to quantify) and longwinded, and postponing the merge further is likely not worth this.