Miner Costs and Fees

Configuring Cost and Fee Estimation

config.toml

[fee_estimation]
cost_estimator = naive_pessimistic
fee_estimator = scalar_fee_rate
fee_rate_fuzzer_fraction = 0.1
fee_rate_window_size = 5
cost_metric = proportion_dot_product
log_error = false
enabled = true

Fee and cost estimators observe network transactions and build estimates for viable fee rates and expected execution costs from the costs they see. log_error controls whether the INFO logger will display information about cost estimator accuracy as new costs are observed. Setting enabled = false turns off the cost estimators.

Accepted values, as of stacks-core 4.0.3:

Key	Accepted values	Default
cost_estimator	naive_pessimistic	naive_pessimistic
fee_estimator	scalar_fee_rate, fuzzed_weighted_median_fee_rate	scalar_fee_rate
cost_metric	proportion_dot_product	proportion_dot_product

The sample above is the default configuration. The node lowercases each value and panics at startup on anything else.

Cost estimators are not consensus-critical components: they are intended for miners to rank mempool transactions or for clients to pick appropriate fee rates before broadcasting.

The fuzzed_weighted_median_fee_rate estimator:

• uses a median estimate from a window of the fees paid in the last fee_rate_window_size blocks, and
• then applies a uniform random "fuzz" up to fee_rate_fuzzer_fraction of the base estimate.

The Epoch 4.0 block read budget

Epoch 4.0 doubles the read fields of the Clarity block execution budget. Write and runtime limits are unchanged.

Field	Epoch 2.1 through 3.4	Epoch 4.0
read_length	100,000,000	200,000,000
read_count	15,000	30,000
write_length	15,000,000	15,000,000
write_count	15,000	15,000
runtime	5,000,000,000	5,000,000,000

This is the per-block budget, not the per-function cost table. Individual Clarity function costs are unchanged, so a block reaches its read limit at twice the previous volume. The config keys and estimator names above are unaffected.

Read the limits your node is enforcing:

curl -s http://localhost:20443/v2/pox \
  | jq '.epochs[] | select(.epoch_id=="Epoch40") | .block_limit'

Mining calculator (external)

Mining calculator: https://friedger.github.io/mining-calculator/

Source: https://github.com/friedger/mining-calculator