Four resources
Everything a transaction does costs something: running instructions, reading and writing records, carrying bytes across the network, and leaving state behind that every node must keep. Ting measures these with four independent counters, so that a transaction pays for each kind of work in its own unit and a block can hold only as much of each as the network has agreed to. The exact rules are in sections 11 to 15 of the protocol rules.
| Counter | Measures exactly | For example |
|---|---|---|
| C, compute | Instructions, function entries, memory, byte work, hashing, starting programs and preparing code, each at a measured price | Executing instructions, copying bytes, writing a record's value |
| S, state access | Logical record reads and writes, including the runtime's reads of manifests and code | Loading a program, reading and writing storage |
| D, data | The encoded transaction with its framing and fixed receipt fields, and every output and event byte programs generate | The transaction itself, results, events |
| G, growth | Gross positive persistent allocation | Creating records, enlarging values |
They are quantities, not fees. They are never converted into one another or combined into a single number. They are defined by logical events with fixed charges, never by the CPU time, disk operations or cache behavior of a run. The compute charges were set once from measurements, so that one C stands for about the same work whatever it is spent on: about one integer addition that has to wait for the one before it. They are fixed numbers, so two nodes on very different hardware count exactly the same amounts.
Each transaction declares a budget for all four, and each block has a capacity for all four. The capacities are independent as well: more compute per block does not bring more state access or more growth with it. Why they are kept separate is covered in Four counters, not one price.
The pages of this section explain each part: every event and its charge, the price list for compute, how budgets nest and run out, how persistent allocation is counted, and the block totals and the few fixed bounds.