Suggestion: Light Accounts

[JoelKatz]

Light accounts would allow a limited account to be created without having to pay the 20 XRP reserve. Instead, a 5 XRP reserve would be paid. Light accounts would be limited in their function but they could certainly hold, receive, and send XRP.

There are some options around what features a light account would be permitted to access. Light accounts could be permitted to have a single multisigner list or they could be permitted to have a small number of payment channels or escrows. Likely they would not be permitted to have any trust lines or offers.

This post is one suggestion for an enhancement to the XRP Ledger. See this post for context:
https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33070-suggestions-for-xrp-ledger-enhancements/

You can find all the suggestions in one place here: https://coil.com/p/xpring/Ideas-for-the-Future-of-XRP-Ledger/-OZP0FlZQ 

[pucksterpete]

I like it 

[mDuo13]

It's a neat idea, but I'm not looking forward to trying to explain the difference between Light Accounts and full accounts. I think I'd rather lean towards finding ways to reduce the resource consumption of full accounts, so that there aren't extra barriers to entry for expanding from basic XRPL usage to more advanced stuff. Making full accounts deletable is a good start, and probably some updates to how we cache things in memory could improve it further. Plus maybe letting the shard store handle more things.

[richxrp]

2 hours ago, JoelKatz said:

Light accounts would allow a limited account to be created without having to pay the 20 XRP reserve. Instead, a 5 XRP reserve would be paid. Light accounts would be limited in their function but they could certainly hold, receive, and send XRP.

There are some options around what features a light account would be permitted to access. Light accounts could be permitted to have a single multisigner list or they could be permitted to have a small number of payment channels or escrows. Likely they would not be permitted to have any trust lines or offers.

This post is one suggestion for an enhancement to the XRP Ledger. See this post for context:
https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33070-suggestions-for-xrp-ledger-enhancements/

My personal opinion is that it over complicates matters in what should be a simple mechanism designed to prevent spamming the network.  The reserve should be set at a level which is just low enough to fulfill it's intended purpose but not so high as to be too onerous to open an account. 

Also in keeping to a simple design philosophy,  if all accounts were to follow the same rule, it adheres to the KISS principle  ... Keep it Simple and Stupid..

Edited October 2, 2019 by richxrp

[RareData]

Please carefully consider dedicated signing devices or other airgapped systems, they may not have the luxury of performing lookups on the XRP ledger, to know if they've hit their limits. Also consider that extra logic or implementation requirements, to differentiate between full and light accounts, can easily get messy. Third-parties integrating with the XRP ledger should not be forced to rearrange items on their roadmaps or add new ones.

Edited October 2, 2019 by RareData

[Sukrim]

I am not a big fan of XRP and a much bigger fan of the built-in DEX, so having an account type that can't even use these features (no trust lines = no "Ripple" [in the original sense] system) is something that I really don't want to see. Currently a lot of accounts are limited in functionality by the clients used to interact with the ledger, not so much the ledger itself (lots of "wallets" only allow XRP Payment transactions). I'd rather see a few functionalities being removed from all accounts to separate objects, so Accounts in general become a bit more manageable (e.g. issued currencies + their settings could be their own object and modification rights owned by the issuing account).

Limiting features that are sometimes security relevant (multisign) or enable novel use cases (multisign, checks, ripplestate, paychan, escrow...) just for a few bytes or XRP saved is not really a good idea in my opinion. I'd much rather see existing accounts become lightweight (and then cheap?) enough to not necessitate such an extreme approach.

An alternative idea could be to have feature flags that you can enable/disable for accounts that increase/decrease the reserve and allow for optimizations that way (no multisign because your key is on a hardware wallet anyways? Disable the feature and your account takes up less space on disk and in RAM and costs less reserve until you re-enable it!)

[Quinson]

14 minutes ago, Sukrim said:

An alternative idea could be to have feature flags that you can enable/disable for accounts that increase/decrease the reserve and allow for optimizations that way (no multisign because your key is on a hardware wallet anyways? Disable the feature and your account takes up less space on disk and in RAM and costs less reserve until you re-enable it!)

I think this is the way.

[Hodor]

3 hours ago, JoelKatz said:

Light accounts would allow a limited account to be created without having to pay the 20 XRP reserve. Instead, a 5 XRP reserve would be paid. Light accounts would be limited in their function but they could certainly hold, receive, and send XRP.

There are some options around what features a light account would be permitted to access. Light accounts could be permitted to have a single multisigner list or they could be permitted to have a small number of payment channels or escrows. Likely they would not be permitted to have any trust lines or offers.

At first after reading this, I was gung-ho in support of this idea; but I think @mDuo13 makes some important points about logistics and communication. 

So then the question becomes 'is the benefit of these accounts more than the cost?' 

[damascus1986]

5 hours ago, Hodor said:

At first after reading this, I was gung-ho in support of this idea; but I think @mDuo13 makes some important points about logistics and communication. 

So then the question becomes 'is the benefit of these accounts more than the cost?' 

agreed  if in the future  they decide to lower the reserve amount that can certainly be done as it used to be 50xrp. i lean towards the side of caution   that there might be a bug or something that could be exploited. im not a super tech guy but for me the 15xrp may not be worth the possibility of a risk. 

[Malloy]

10 hours ago, JoelKatz said:

Light accounts...

Before working on a "Light account" could someone build a fully working Desktop account? 

The only working wallet we can use to transact, etc. is the latest version of the Ripple client updated by Rippex 2-3 years ago...nothing...I say nothing has been done that comes close to be usable for traders/marketmakers on the Ripple network since...

The result: fewer users...lost gateways..low volume...ghost town

I have my fingers crossed that Bitstamp and GateHub don't leave cause only RippleFox would be left and you can almost say goodbye to the DEX as we knew it...

I'm honestly starting to look at Stellar's development...that is almost scary considering how much I don't want to be there :-)

@JoelKatz if I remember you posted something about working (or helping/consulting) maybe 2 years ago on the development of a brand new Desktop wallet...any thing came out of this?

 

[Guest]

@Malloy made an excellent point.

The Rippletrade client was a great tool to visually learn and understand how great the Rippleledger is and how it works. So easy to issue an IOU on the ledger. So nice for decentral trading in just one trading client. Many new users never made this smooth user experience. For non-tech users it's difficult to understand all the great features that Ripple offers without any easy to use visual-client.

[OscarB]

It can be an external object that holds value managed by an account. Like a financial instrument in which one ore more accounts have some claims. Some metadata, an access control list to access the metadata by third parties, or private. Or a Pay per view instrument, where the pool of money can be periodically sent to the main account or accounts.

Also, I think multisig or some simpler pssword is important for more use cases to interact with that account.

Edited October 3, 2019 by OscarB

[Jerrybo]

I agree with others, that a separation between account types would create additionalal hurdles for devs and consumers. The network should keep as easy understandable as possible. Also here again: What is the root problem that needs to be solved? If there were no XRP reserve, would there still be a need for light accounts? If yes, why?

I like @Sukrim's approach with feature flags. We could understand them like a configuration for specific wallet use cases. Ex. one wallet could only be used for multi sign. To give the receiver of that specific wallet a "free signing key without reserve" the reserve could be increased at the creator's wallet.

[Guest]

When deleting an account maybe one of the options could be to make it a light account but then what happens when you delete a light account...?

[tulo]

On 10/2/2019 at 5:25 PM, Sukrim said:

An alternative idea could be to have feature flags that you can enable/disable for accounts that increase/decrease the reserve and allow for optimizations that way (no multisign because your key is on a hardware wallet anyways? Disable the feature and your account takes up less space on disk and in RAM and costs less reserve until you re-enable it!)

Bingo!