How much should I pay nodes?

Question

Disclaimer: I'm not a developer and just started venturing the blockchain and Stellar worlds

Until this morning, my understanding was that miners get compensated for their work by getting gas/transaction fees which are paid in the native blockchain cryptocurrencies (in Stellar case it would be XML lumens).

But today, chatting with a guy who has started a blockchain business, he told me that an app/dapp owner should also take into account how much they pay nodes, besides gas/transaction fees.

I'm Googling to find more info, but I'm a bit lost... if you develop an app that makes transactions on Stellar, do you need to pay nodes besides regular gas/transaction fees? How/How much? And is Stellar different from other blockchains in this matter?

Answer 1

Stellar has a fixed base fee. You can calculate the expected fee with this formula (# of operations × base fee) where base fee is 100 stroops. See the docs.

Nobody can earns XLM from his validator because all fees goes into the fee pool, and then these lumens are distributed by inflation pools.

inflation docs

Stellar use a different consensus protocol, SCP, the process that you're talking about is typical of POW consensus like e.g. Ethereum.

Lumens weren't mined, they were emitted from the root keypair and periodically distributed.

For more info take a look at this page

Answer 2

The term "node" is generally used for just a server in the p2p-network that relays all the valid transaction data to other nodes and clients (eg. bitcoind or stellar-core). It's a good idea to operate your own node to eliminate dependencies (um... I mean contribute to the distribution of the network :).

I'm not aware of any cryptocurrency that rewards nodes. Costs for operating an own node depends on your needs and can range from a couple of bucks for a raspberry pi in your basement to f... expensive for a distributed high availability cluster run by a service provider with a tight service level agreement.