Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 2:40 AM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.comwrote: optional uint64 allowfeetag number=1000 Let's just use a normal/low tag number. The extensions mechanism is great for people who want to extend the protocol outside the core development process. It'd be weird if nobody ever used the low numbers again though. Tag numbers are varint encoded so using smaller ones does have a minor efficiency benefit, it's not just aesthetics :) Allow up to allowfee satoshis to be deducted from the amount paid to be used to pay Bitcoin network transaction fees. A wallet implementation must not reduce the amount paid for fees more than allowfee, and transaction fees must be equal to or greater than the amount reduced. Hmmm. Why allow? Should it not be called min_fee instead? Wallets would have to attach at least that much in fees, right? Also, why describe it as reducing the amount paid? Which output would be reduced in value? Why not just have it be added to the total value displayed to the user and the outputs are left alone/not reduced. We also want to allow users to pay MORE in fees, if they need to (fragmented wallet, maybe, or big CoinJoin transaction) or decide to. I like the idea but it seems this gets us back to the original problem - senders don't care about confirmations, ever, not even if they make an annoying set of transactions. The protocol allows users to submit transactions directly to receivers, I guess, if the receiver does not like the transactions they get they could potentially reject the payment. But I'd hope that's really rare. PS: I think there was also consensus that the BIP72 request=... should be shortened to just r=... (save 6 chars in QR codes). Unless somebody objects, I'll change the BIP and the reference implementation code to make it so... Sweet, thanks! -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
I dont like the idea of putting the min fee in the hands of the receiver. Seems like that will work against the best interests of senders in the long run. Why not try a different path of calculating the min fee like difficulty retarget. You can analyse the last 2016 blocks to find the average fee accepted per kb (which would include transactions that were included without fees) and then write that into the block as a soft recommendation that wallets could use in the UI. This way the price can vary up and down according to what people were willing to spend on fees and miners willing to accept. I absolutely do not trust vendors to set fees. I think it has to be based on what senders are willing to pay and what miners are willing to accept. Drak -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 11:36 AM, Drak d...@zikula.org wrote: I dont like the idea of putting the min fee in the hands of the receiver. Seems like that will work against the best interests of senders in the long run. Senders have no interest in ever attaching any kind of fee, which is one reason we explored child-pays-for-parent for a while. It's not the sender who cares about double spending risk. Left to their own devices, all senders would always attach no fee at all (or rather: whatever the min was to get the transaction relayed to the merchant). However, receivers do want a fee attached, and ideally we would do this without redundant transactions. Hence, receivers asking senders to attach a fee and effectively folding it into the price that is paid. That is, if you go into a restaurant and the menu says Burger: 10mBTC then when you come to pay, what you see on your phone screen is 10mBTC. The fact that actually the shop with receiver 9.9mBTC and the tx fee is 0.1mBTC is hidden in the user interface - creating a situation like many others, where receivers eat a transaction cost. For instance in Europe sales taxes are included in the price, not attached separately later. There's no need to trust the vendor. If a vendor asks for a ridiculously high tx fee, it will just surface as uncompetitively priced goods/services. Buyers will go elsewhere. Why not try a different path of calculating the min fee like difficulty retarget. You can analyse the last 2016 blocks to find the average fee accepted per kb (which would include transactions that were included without fees) and then write that into the block as a soft recommendation that wallets could use in the UI. This way the price can vary up and down according to what people were willing to spend on fees and miners willing to accept. That's what fee estimation does, essentially, minus the encoding into blocks. Once you start getting miners telling people what fees are directly you run into cases where they might try to lie about their behaviour or otherwise influence the average. Querying all nodes avoids that problem. -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 11:40:35AM +1000, Gavin Andresen wrote: On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:44 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: PPv1 doesn't have any notion of fee unfortunately. I suppose it could be added easily, but we also need to launch the existing feature set. Lets bang out a merchant-pays-fee extension. How about: SPEC: optional uint64 allowfeetag number=1000 Allow up to allowfee satoshis to be deducted from the amount paid to be used to pay Bitcoin network transaction fees. A wallet implementation must not reduce the amount paid for fees more than allowfee, and transaction fees must be equal to or greater than the amount reduced. Fees are per byte of tx data; call it allowfeeperkb, and given that fees are required - the merchant would really rather not waste up to about twice as much on fees for a child-pays-for-parent - it should be called requirefeeperkb. Back to your point, the merchant wants to limit total fees that have been deducted - 'allowfee' is still a good idea - but only in conjunction with specifying fee-per-kb requirements. UI once both are implemented is to not show anything in the default case, and explain to the user why they have to pay extra in the unusual case where they are spending a whole bunch of dust. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 000f9102d27cfd61ea9e8bb324593593ca3ce6ba53153ff251b3 signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 11:09:51AM +, Drak wrote: On 3 December 2013 11:03, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: UI once both are implemented is to not show anything in the default case, and explain to the user why they have to pay extra in the unusual case where they are spending a whole bunch of dust. Yes, that's the other problem with a merchant setting a fee - they have no idea how large the transaction might be. If you spend a bunch of dust the fee could be 2 or 3x the expected fee. Then you might get merchants including higher fees by default to account for this. That means we end up paying more per kb over time. Right, which is solved by requiring a fee-per-kb, and only allowing up to a certain amount to be deducted from the amount paid to pay that total fee. But really, we're better off leaving fees visible to the user in the first place: they're how Bitcoin works and it's not going to change. (was just talking to Taylor from Hive Wallet about that in person actually) -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 000f9102d27cfd61ea9e8bb324593593ca3ce6ba53153ff251b3 signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 12:29:03PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote: On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:07 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.comwrote: Making it fee-per-kilobyte is a bad idea, in my opinion; users don't care how many kilobytes their transactions are, and they will just be confused if they're paying for a 10mBTC burger and are asked to pay 10.00011 or 9.9994 because the merchant has no idea how many kilobytes the paying transaction will be. Wouldn't the idea be that the user always sees 10mBTC no matter what, but the receiver may receive less if the user decides to pay with a huge transaction? It may be acceptable that receivers don't always receive exactly what they requested, at least for person-to-business transactions. For person-to-person transactions of course any fee at all is confusing because you intuitively expect that if you send 1 mBTC, then 1 mBTC will arrive the other end. I wonder if we'll end up in a world where buying things from shops involves paying fees, and (more occasional?) person-to-person transactions tend to be free and people just understand that the money isn't going to be spendable for a while. Or alternatively that wallets let you override the safeguards on spending unconfirmed coins when the user is sure that they trust the sender. Person-to-person payments are an *excellent* argument for keeping fees visible to end-users; people will pay other people commonly in Bitcoin and they will be very confused if those transactions act weirdly differently than payments to merchants. NAK on unconfirmed overrides - if something goes wrong even by accident it just makes fixing the problem much harder and less intuitive. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 000f9102d27cfd61ea9e8bb324593593ca3ce6ba53153ff251b3 signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
Wouldn't the idea be that the user always sees 10mBTC no matter what, but the receiver may receive less if the user decides to pay with a huge transaction? If users want to pay with a huge transaction then it seems to me the user should cover that cost. Allowing users to pay merchants with 100K transactions full of dust and expecting them to eat the cost seems like a great way to enable bleed-the-merchant-dry attacks. RE: hiding or showing fees: I pointed out to Peter that there doesn't have to be One True Answer. Let wallets experiment with either hiding or exposing fees, and may the best user experience win. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.comwrote: If users want to pay with a huge transaction then it seems to me the user should cover that cost. Allowing users to pay merchants with 100K transactions full of dust and expecting them to eat the cost seems like a great way to enable bleed-the-merchant-dry attacks. A merchant can always refuse the payment and refund it if that's a practical problem. I doubt it would be though. If a user is trying to buy something from the merchant, they will want it to work, and it'll be up to the developers of the wallet they're using to ensure it never does anything obnoxious or unacceptable that would result in people hating to receive money from that app. RE: hiding or showing fees: I pointed out to Peter that there doesn't have to be One True Answer. Let wallets experiment with either hiding or exposing fees, and may the best user experience win. Sure. I think there will be experimentation in this regard. -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
A merchant can always refuse the payment and refund it if that's a practical problem. No, they can't, at least not in bitcoin-qt: when the user pokes the SEND button, the transaction is broadcast on the network, and then the merchant is also told with the Payment/PaymentACK round-trip. Allowing merchants to cancel (e.g. having a PaymentNACK) makes implementation harder, and brings up nasty issues if we want to allow CoinJoin or CoinJoin-like transactions as payments to merchants. Bitcoin-Qt ALREADY allows you to pay several PaymentRequests with one transaction; handling the case where one merchant gives you a PaymentACK and another gives you (or wants to give you) a PaymentNACK is a nightmare. -- Gavin Andresen -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
On 3 December 2013 11:46, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.comwrote: If users want to pay with a huge transaction then it seems to me the user should cover that cost. Allowing users to pay merchants with 100K transactions full of dust and expecting them to eat the cost seems like a great way to enable bleed-the-merchant-dry attacks. A merchant can always refuse the payment and refund it if that's a practical problem. I doubt it would be though. If a user is trying to buy something from the merchant, they will want it to work, and it'll be up to the developers of the wallet they're using to ensure it never does anything obnoxious or unacceptable that would result in people hating to receive money from that app. Refunds in this circumstance would be problematic because someone is going to lose because they have to pay the fee. If the sender's money is refunded minus the fee, they will be unhappy. And the merchant will be unhappy about having had an unacceptable transaction they have to send back, and eat a fee for the privilege. This kind of situation needs to be avoided at all costs. -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 12:57:23PM +0100, Taylor Gerring wrote: On Dec 3, 2013, at 12:29 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: It may be acceptable that receivers don't always receive exactly what they requested, at least for person-to-business transactions. For person-to-person transactions of course any fee at all is confusing because you intuitively expect that if you send 1 mBTC, then 1 mBTC will arrive the other end. I wonder if we'll end up in a world where buying things from shops involves paying fees, and (more occasional?) person-to-person transactions tend to be free and people just understand that the money isn't going to be spendable for a while. person-to-business transactions. For person-to-person transactions Why should there be two classes of transactions? Where does paying a local business at a farmer’s stand lie in that realm? Transactions should work the same regardless of who is on the receiving end. any fee at all is confusing because you intuitively expect that if you send 1 mBTC, then 1 mBTC will arrive the other end The paradigm of sending money has an explicit cost is not new... I think people are used to Western Union/PayPal and associated fees, no? It’s okay to have a fee if it’s reasonable, so let’s inform the user what the estimated cost is to send a transaction in a reasonable amount of time. Indeed. Transparency on fees is going to be good from a marketing point of view as well: fact is, Bitcoin transations have fees involved, and if we're up-front and honest about those fees and what they are and why, we demystify the system and give people the confidence to tell others about the cost-advantages of Bitcoin, and at the same time, combat fud about fees with accurate and honest information. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 000f9102d27cfd61ea9e8bb324593593ca3ce6ba53153ff251b3 signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Taylor Gerring taylor.gerr...@gmail.comwrote: Why should there be two classes of transactions? Where does paying a local business at a farmer’s stand lie in that realm? Transactions should work the same regardless of who is on the receiving end. Lots and lots of people are psychologically trained to expect that they pay the sticker price for things. Yes in recent times some places have started to show additional fees for using credit cards, but only as a way to try and push people onto cheaper forms of payment, not because customers love surcharges. It's for that reason that many merchants don't do this, even when they could - I pay for things with Maestro Debit all the time and I don't think I've ever seen a surcharge. That system obviously has costs, but they're included. This is just a basic cultural thing - when I buy something from a shop, the social expectation is that the seller should be grateful for receiving my money. The customer is always right. When I send money to a friend, the social expectation is different. If my friend said, hey Mike, could you send me that 10 bucks you owe me from last weekend and what he receives is less than 10 bucks, he would probably feel annoyed - if I owe him 10 bucks then I owe him 10 bucks and it's my job the cover the fees. That's why PayPal makes sender pay fees in that case. Maybe we need new terminology for this. *Interior fees* for included in the price/receiver pays and *exterior fees* for excluded from the price/sender pays? Fees are only confusing because existing clients do a terrible job of presenting the information to the user. In Hive Wallet, I’m of the opinion that we should inform the user in an intuitive way to let them make an informed decision. Have you thought through the UI for that in detail? How exactly are you going to explain the fee structure? Let the user pick the number of blocks they need to wait for? What's a block? Why should I care? Why shouldn't I just set the slider all the way to the other end and pay no fees at all? Is the merchant going to refuse to take my payment? Gavin just said that's not possible with Bitcoin-Qt. I'm thinking for bitcoinj I might go in a slightly different direction and not broadcast payments submitted via the payment protocol (and definitely not have one wire tx pay multiple payment requests simultaneously, at least not for consumer wallets). -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
On Dec 3, 2013, at 2:20 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Taylor Gerring taylor.gerr...@gmail.com wrote: Why should there be two classes of transactions? Where does paying a local business at a farmer’s stand lie in that realm? Transactions should work the same regardless of who is on the receiving end. Lots and lots of people are psychologically trained to expect that they pay the sticker price for things. Yes in recent times some places have started to show additional fees for using credit cards, but only as a way to try and push people onto cheaper forms of payment, not because customers love surcharges. It's for that reason that many merchants don't do this, even when they could - I pay for things with Maestro Debit all the time and I don't think I've ever seen a surcharge. That system obviously has costs, but they're included. This is just a basic cultural thing - when I buy something from a shop, the social expectation is that the seller should be grateful for receiving my money. The customer is always right. When I send money to a friend, the social expectation is different. If my friend said, hey Mike, could you send me that 10 bucks you owe me from last weekend and what he receives is less than 10 bucks, he would probably feel annoyed - if I owe him 10 bucks then I owe him 10 bucks and it's my job the cover the fees. That's why PayPal makes sender pay fees in that case. Maybe we need new terminology for this. Interior fees for included in the price/receiver pays and exterior fees for excluded from the price/sender pays? Fees are only confusing because existing clients do a terrible job of presenting the information to the user. In Hive Wallet, I’m of the opinion that we should inform the user in an intuitive way to let them make an informed decision. Have you thought through the UI for that in detail? How exactly are you going to explain the fee structure? Let the user pick the number of blocks they need to wait for? What's a block? Why should I care? Why shouldn't I just set the slider all the way to the other end and pay no fees at all? Is the merchant going to refuse to take my payment? Gavin just said that's not possible with Bitcoin-Qt. I'm thinking for bitcoinj I might go in a slightly different direction and not broadcast payments submitted via the payment protocol (and definitely not have one wire tx pay multiple payment requests simultaneously, at least not for consumer wallets). Most of what you mentioned is entirely culture-dependant. In the majority of North America, sales tax is calculated at the point of sale on top of the advertised price. When my local government increases sales taxes, we feel it BECAUSE we see it. Expose information in a digestible way. Just because you don’t instinctively know how to implement a UI for varying sender fees doesn’t mean that other wallets don’t. Leave the fee structure alone. Instead, let’s concentrate on how to calculate an accurate assessment of what a reasonable fee is for reliable service and let the software shake out the rest. Taylor -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
The merchant wants to include a fee to ensure the transaction is confirmed which is dependent on the fee per kilobyte, but they don't want to pay unexpectedly high fees. So what about including a min_fee_per_kilobyte and a max_fee in PaymentDetails describing what fees the merchant will pay. The sender would be expected to respect the min_fee_per_kilobyte but if the result exceeds max_fee the sender would be agreeing to pay the extra fee (exterior fees). The sender might also agree to pay fees in excess of min_fee_per_kilobyte. The sender would deduct the interior or merchant fees from the first output. The UI could show the payment price which would match the sum of original outputs. It would show the merchant fees (interior) and sender fees (exterior) if there are any. The UI should always show fees so users learn to expect them for all transactions. This should allow the merchant to pay fees in most cases while not having to pay excessive fees if the sender wants to use some large transaction. If max_fee is 0 the sender would be expected to pay all fees. On 12/03/2013 10:20 AM, Mike Hearn wrote: On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Taylor Gerring taylor.gerr...@gmail.com mailto:taylor.gerr...@gmail.com wrote: Why should there be two classes of transactions? Where does paying a local business at a farmer's stand lie in that realm? Transactions should work the same regardless of who is on the receiving end. Lots and lots of people are psychologically trained to expect that they pay the sticker price for things. Yes in recent times some places have started to show additional fees for using credit cards, but only as a way to try and push people onto cheaper forms of payment, not because customers love surcharges. It's for that reason that many merchants don't do this, even when they could - I pay for things with Maestro Debit all the time and I don't think I've ever seen a surcharge. That system obviously has costs, but they're included. This is just a basic cultural thing - when I buy something from a shop, the social expectation is that the seller should be grateful for receiving my money. The customer is always right. When I send money to a friend, the social expectation is different. If my friend said, hey Mike, could you send me that 10 bucks you owe me from last weekend and what he receives is less than 10 bucks, he would probably feel annoyed - if I owe him 10 bucks then I owe him 10 bucks and it's my job the cover the fees. That's why PayPal makes sender pay fees in that case. Maybe we need new terminology for this. /Interior fees/ for included in the price/receiver pays and /exterior fees/ for excluded from the price/sender pays? Fees are only confusing because existing clients do a terrible job of presenting the information to the user. In Hive Wallet, I'm of the opinion that we should inform the user in an intuitive way to let them make an informed decision. Have you thought through the UI for that in detail? How exactly are you going to explain the fee structure? Let the user pick the number of blocks they need to wait for? What's a block? Why should I care? Why shouldn't I just set the slider all the way to the other end and pay no fees at all? Is the merchant going to refuse to take my payment? Gavin just said that's not possible with Bitcoin-Qt. I'm thinking for bitcoinj I might go in a slightly different direction and not broadcast payments submitted via the payment protocol (and definitely not have one wire tx pay multiple payment requests simultaneously, at least not for consumer wallets). -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
[Bitcoin-development] Suggestion: easy way to restore wallet.dat backup
I posted this on bitcoin-user, but nobody replied, so I'm trying here. Today, when a user uses bitcoin-qt client, it can make a backup of wallet.dat easily through menu, but when he/she needs to restore this backup, he/she must copy the file to the correct folder and execute bitcoin-qt -rescan. My suggestion: bitcoin-qt developers could implement an easier way to restore. For example: a option in the File menu Restore Wallet or Recover Wallet where it would show a dialog asking for the backup file and everything would be done automatically (no need to do it manually). If we want everybody to use bitcoin, these operations should be as easy as possible. What do you think? -- Linux 3.12.0: One Giant Leap for Frogkind http://www.youtube.com/DanielFragaBR http://mcxnow.com Bitcoin: 12H6661yoLDUZaYPdah6urZS5WiXwTAUgL -- Sponsored by Intel(R) XDK Develop, test and display web and hybrid apps with a single code base. Download it for free now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=111408631iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
allowfee: Allow up to allowfee satoshis to be deducted from the amount paid to be used to pay Bitcoin network transaction fees. A wallet implementation must not reduce the amount paid for fees more than allowfee, and transaction fees must be equal to or greater than the amount reduced. minfee: Pay at least minfee satoshis in transaction fees. Wallet software should add minfee to the amount the user authorizes and pays, and include at least minfee in the transaction created to pay miner's transaction fees. Wallet software may request that the user pays more, if it must create a complex transaction or judges that minfee is not sufficient for the transaction to be accepted by the network.. Thanks for the draft specs Gavin. Very clear and precise. Personally I think 'allowfee' is more useful than 'minfee'. The 'allowfee' tells me something very useful and definitive about what the merchant will let me do when making payment, and if the merchant chooses 'allowfee' intelligently, they can provide real value to their customers without exposing them to undue risk. A 'minfee' field on the other hand, is just a data point for the wallet software to consider, and likely to be noisy enough that wallets will tend to ignore it. (e.g. like Drak's example of Gox's 0.001 fee) The sender's wallet software will always be free to choose the fee, and paying less than the 'allowfee' or 'minfee' can still get a TX included in the next block. I think of the PaymentRequest is a part of the purchase contract. If a payer transmits a transaction before 'expires' but with less than 'minfee', which gets included in the next block, have they failed to meet the terms of payment? If there is some time criticality, for example to reduce exchange rate risk, then a wallet might need to choose a higher fee to ensure the transaction clears in time. Instead of 'minfee' I'm thinking it would be more appropriate to communicate this using the existing 'expires' field -- in other words, let the merchant express what their requirement is, not tell the wallet how to achieve it. In the case of a transaction with too-low fee, either the payer can double-spend with a higher fee, or wait longer for the transaction to make it into a block. If it hits the blockchain before the 'expires' time, then the merchant should have no standing to refute it, regardless of the amount of fees paid. A refund comes into play if a payer reduced the total amount in excess of an agreed upon 'allowfee', or if the transaction doesn't hit the blockchain until after 'expires'. It should be clear in these cases that payer would end up eating the fees in both directions. But then, what if a wallet pays the 'minfee' and broadcasts 1 block before 'expires' but the payment DOESN'T make the block? Is the merchant liable for too-slow transactions due to their own insufficient 'minfee' value? So I see 'allowfee' as extremely useful, but 'minfee' as somewhat problematic. Thanks, Jeremy -- Sponsored by Intel(R) XDK Develop, test and display web and hybrid apps with a single code base. Download it for free now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=111408631iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Suggestion: easy way to restore wallet.dat backup
On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 11:59 AM, Dâniel Fraga frag...@gmail.com wrote: Today, when a user uses bitcoin-qt client, it can make a backup of wallet.dat easily through menu, but when he/she needs to restore this backup, he/she must copy the file to the correct folder and execute bitcoin-qt -rescan. I actually think this is part of a larger and somewhat subtle UX problem with bitcoin-qt – and, to be totally fair, a whole bunch of other wallet programs. I think the issue is that bitcoin-qt should have a document-oriented approach to wallets. It should make you select a location to store your wallet, just like a word processor, when you create a new wallet. It could open the most recent wallet when you run the program, or allow you to open a wallet by double-clicking it directly in the OS. I think this would solve this particular issue nicely, just double click the wallet file. Also, the menu item can just be labeled Open Wallet. It might also prevent those kind of heartbreaking posts which read something like, I just wiped my hard drive and reinstalled bitcoin-qt, where are my coins? People don't have the expectation that if they get Word on a new PC that their documents will somehow magically be available, I think in part because Word forces you to deal with the documents and the save location yourself. I know that this would bring with it a host of other considerations: Can multiple wallets be open at the same time? What happens if a wallet file is moved while it's open? What happens when there are two versions of the same wallet? Will users understand that they need to backup their wallets periodically? But, I think it would be a big enough usability win that it should be considered. Also, if at the same time bitcoin-qt were to adopt BIP 32 style deterministically derived private keys from a single seed, a bunch of the issues above would also go away: There are never two versions of the same wallet, since they're the same seed, and periodic backups are unnecessary. -- Sponsored by Intel(R) XDK Develop, test and display web and hybrid apps with a single code base. Download it for free now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=111408631iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
After reading all 99 messages in this thread, I think allowfee is just about perfect. It effectively lets merchants to give an allowance against the purchase price for network fees, if they choose. It is still up to the sender (and/or the sender's software) to get the fees right. Sometimes the sender will need to pay more fees than allowed, and sometimes the sender will need to pay less. We can't solve the fee problem, in general. I'm not sure that we can even define it properly. But this is something that we can do, that will be useful at least occasionally, and that will cause no harm the rest of the time. P.S. Clever senders can use this to defrag their wallets. Who wants to write the patch for that? Gavin Andresen wrote: On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:44 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net mailto:m...@plan99.net wrote: PPv1 doesn't have any notion of fee unfortunately. I suppose it could be added easily, but we also need to launch the existing feature set. Lets bang out a merchant-pays-fee extension. How about: SPEC: optional uint64 allowfeetag number=1000 Allow up to allowfee satoshis to be deducted from the amount paid to be used to pay Bitcoin network transaction fees. A wallet implementation must not reduce the amount paid for fees more than allowfee, and transaction fees must be equal to or greater than the amount reduced. :ENDSPEC Rationale: we don't want wallet software giving users discounts-- sending transactions that are amount-allowfee without paying any fee. We also want to allow users to pay MORE in fees, if they need to (fragmented wallet, maybe, or big CoinJoin transaction) or decide to. PS: I think there was also consensus that the BIP72 request=... should be shortened to just r=... (save 6 chars in QR codes). Unless somebody objects, I'll change the BIP and the reference implementation code to make it so... -- -- Gavin Andresen -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- Sponsored by Intel(R) XDK Develop, test and display web and hybrid apps with a single code base. Download it for free now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=111408631iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
