The purpose of this post is to measure support for proceeding with [an adjustment of Kusama's fees proposed by Shawn Tabrizi](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/pull/2451).
### 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](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/commit/7d79dadc28d227d135d28c3b39af1e79fb7ffeda) 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](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/pull/2451) 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](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](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.


- The fees and deposit requirements in Kusama need to be adjusted because the exchange rate has changed a lot.
- Shawn Tabrizi has proposed a solution to adjust the exchange rate to 300 USD/KSM, which would reduce the fees by 50 times.
- The exchange rate is actually higher than 300 USD/KSM, but it's better to stick with that for now because the market is volatile.
- The values of individual parameters should also be re-examined, but it's a complicated discussion and it's not worth delaying the adjustment further.
- In summary, they want to make changes to the fees in Kusama to make them fairer, but there are some details that still need to be figured out.

#552 Reduce Kusama Fees / Deposits by 50x

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