Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: I think this US/other cultural issue is complicating things more than we appreciate. I am trying to imagine in my head how all this will work and what it will look like with allow_fee, and I just can't see it. Merchants want customers to pay the sticker price, deviance from that social norm is extremely rare even after the credit card company contracts that required it have been invalidated. The only time it happens to me is when buying flight tickets with credit cards: but it's only for that method, other payment methods are still treated as free a.k.a interior fees. If you walk into a physical shop and try to pay a large bill with bags of pennies, the merchant won't enter into a complicated agreement where they agree to split the cost of processing with you. They will just reject the payment out of hand and tell you to get real. It has to be that way because otherwise the shop would carry the cost of counting all the pennies and hauling them around, not the buyer (who knows he put the right number of pennies in the bags). As a buyer, I do not care about whether my transaction will confirm. If I try to pay with dust, there is no incentive for me to attach a higher fee than allow_fee to make that confirm, especially if the merchant has no way to reject the payment. What's more, as Jeremy points out, no clean fail mechanism means large piles of manual work and lots of disputes due to payments not clearing before the exchange rate shifts and other things like that. Trying to make the success of payment confirmation a two-person dance seems to have so many edge cases it makes my head hurt. For most pay-to-merchant cases, it has to be the receivers job to get a transaction confirmed, and if the sender doesn't follow the instructions a payment should hard fail and require trying again. If Bitcoin-Qt can't handle that today, that does seem like a problem. In the case of a transaction with too-low fee, either the payer can double-spend with a higher fee You can't do that. When a tx doesn't have the right fee attached you're out of luck today, except for the fact that some pools run with a custom child pays for parent patch. So respending it would bump priority for some miners and not others. Here at the dark wallet conf there seems yo be rough consensus that replacement for fee bumping is a good thing and should be supported; I was talking to Taylor from hive specifically yesterday. The code is trivial on the node side of things and doesn't need consent of anymore than a small minority, and coinjoin forces wallets to handle double spends well anyway. I haven't heard anyone caring about zeroconf safety. I'll be proposing it for formal inclusion in our wallet best practices guidelines. Also fwiw apparently libbitcoin already implements a memory limited mempool and Amir is open to the idea of it using the satoshi consensus critical code for block validity. (therefor fairly safe mining) I wouldn't be surprised if libbitcoin based nodes start getting usage, and with a limited mempool it is very DoS attack safe for them to relay replacements regardless of miner support. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: APG v1.0.9 iQFQBAEBCAA6BQJSnwqsMxxQZXRlciBUb2RkIChsb3cgc2VjdXJpdHkga2V5KSA8 cGV0ZUBwZXRlcnRvZGQub3JnPgAKCRAZnIM7qOfwhR5yCAC3vaQQeoBrLdqn/rO5 Dzblqwl1B6AE1UjFj5+abQEZ2+uPy5P+7dZidpUn8Ms+tDDcCCge6HVOg+UeseaE 8pDP3+VIHZHH+9n6Y3+4facLNpQ3dP/+Zsg4pC+QSAjVV6408+yWPLtpbC6V0apK T6K4qdq0Ct6V+54Ol0Thx+5cJlWLI+XbW2eXze3WjJzj3FgZUK0udBcVWa8JyWAV WD1tv8DpPoUvDDzdmjEyf0EdjvcmamH9mcIvtxRdVwzyY/siZoizv9X8/gXNL+fg JJ3Oxwrl1dOYSeENgp9VP8fU7GK7855bT1Wxd5zGNW7p/1gNxN4Lnx57XSMz2IHc dHbg =dcYz -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- 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
On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 12:09:42PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote: Please don't try and drag this thread off topic. What I said is factually correct. If you want to (again) try and convince people things should work differently, start another thread for that. replace-by-fee is no less speculative than your original proposals; you're also trying to convince people that things should work differently re: fees -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 000f9102d27cfd61ea9e8bb324593593ca3ce6ba53153ff251b3 signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- 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
On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 2:06 PM, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: replace-by-fee is no less speculative than your original proposals; you're also trying to convince people that things should work differently re: fees The original proposal I started this thread with hasn't even received comments - presumably it's uncontroversial. The other discussions are about how to handle fees in requests that use the payment protocol, which isn't currently used anywhere so doing things differently isn't possible. On the other hand you have been talking about a fundamental change to the behaviour of how all Bitcoin nodes operate, which is off topic for this thread. If you have something specific to say about how floating fees should be managed by SPV wallets or how fees should be negotiated when the payment protocol is in use, this thread is appropriate. Otherwise please take it elsewhere. -- 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
On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 02:48:08PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote: On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 2:06 PM, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: replace-by-fee is no less speculative than your original proposals; you're also trying to convince people that things should work differently re: fees The original proposal I started this thread with hasn't even received comments - presumably it's uncontroversial. The other discussions are about how to handle fees in requests that use the payment protocol, which isn't currently used anywhere so doing things differently isn't possible. On the other hand you have been talking about a fundamental change to the behaviour of how all Bitcoin nodes operate, which is off topic for this thread. If you have something specific to say about how floating fees should be managed by SPV wallets or how fees should be negotiated when the payment protocol is in use, this thread is appropriate. Otherwise please take it elsewhere. Other than you, replacement for fee changing isn't controversial; I know this because no-one other than you comments on it... just like the fundemental changes involving your proposed hardfork presumably. (which I did comment on) Besides, Happily, there does not have to be One Correct Answer here. Let wallets compete, and may the best user experience win... -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 000f9102d27cfd61ea9e8bb324593593ca3ce6ba53153ff251b3 signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- 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
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
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] 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
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
First time posting to this mailing list so feel free to ignore me if this is a stupid idea. On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 3:49 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: We need to get away from the notion of senders attaching fees anyway. This is the wrong way around because it’s the recipient who cares about double spending risk, not the sender. It seems to me that a common problem currently revolves around accepting transactions in retail scenarios, such as paying for a sandwich from Subway. A solution could be to give the vendor responsibility for setting the fee, which means they can choose the trade-off that works best for them in terms of fee size vs. speed of processing. Idea: Add a fee parameter to the payment URI specification. When processing the transaction, the customer's UI should show only the total price, including both the transfer amount and the fee. The vendor only accepts the transaction if the customer uses the right amount and fee. If the fee is too small (for example, the user might be using an older wallet and has selected a fee of zero), the vendor can issue a refund transaction immediately and tell the user to try again. Pros: - could easily be implemented immediately - old wallets would still be supported by just manually entering the fee as users do now - no greater risk of double spending on either side - maintains the distributed nature of the system - relies on humans to judge the fee (who are much less likely to spiral infinitely upwards) - flexible enough to support varying sizes of transaction and varying degrees of security Cons - requires the vendor to have sufficient understanding of Bitcoin to make the trade-off - doesn't solve the problem of selecting a fee for transactions between individuals/laymen - doesn't solve fee selection for automated transactions such as mixing/de/refragmentation Thoughts? -- 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 Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 9:33 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: The payment protocol at least would need some notion of fee, or possibly (better?) the ability for a recipient to specify some inputs as well as some outputs. vendor hat: on BitPay noticed this detail last week. We were noticing that some transactions were not even reaching our bitcoind border routers (edge nodes), due to low/no fees. That led to a long discussion of all things fee-related. SPV fees are a big issue. Getting child-pays-for-parent in some form out to miners is another. Getting a smart, dynamic fee market Gavin mentions is a big need. -- Jeff Garzik Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/ -- 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 12:44 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. :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
[Bitcoin-development] Floating fees and SPV clients
Lately I was pondering how to make floating fees and SPV wallets work well together. I propose the following plan: 1) 0.9 ships with something dead simple, like a command to query what a node estimates and then clients just take the average, or cross-check a centralised estimate against the P2P network. It's fast to implement and simple, but not very secure or decentralised. However it will allow the feature to launch on some kind of reasonable timeframe. 2) We bump the protocol version and the tx message now gets an optional protobuf buffer stuck on the end. The first thing put in this protobuf is a list of the values of the inputs. Using this data, the fee paid by a transaction can be calculated. In step 2 the data is unauthenticated. 3) Some SPV wallets already set themselves up so that they sync with the network in the background, e.g. the Android wallet syncs at least every 24 hours. This should become more common, using scheduler capabilities built into most operating systems. When the wallet syncs with the network, it sets a deliberately very noisy Bloom filter on its peers and waits around for 30-60 seconds or so. The wallet observes some of the broadcasts taking place and records the hashes and associated fees that were paid to disk. Next time it syncs, it includes the observed hashes into the Bloom filter used to download the chain, and thus learns how quickly they confirmed. It can calculate its own fee estimate from that. 4) Finally, when we next hard fork, we make v2 transactions include the output value in the signature, same as the output script (this proposal has been on the forums for a while now). That allows the fee data added in step 2 to be cross-checked against the signatures on the inputs, thus authenticating it. I think this is a small and easy set of steps that would make it quite hard to attack - malicious nodes could make it appear that some transactions never confirmed thus seeming to force the price up, but it's easy to simply exclude transactions which never confirm at all from the calculations. Plus of course you can cross-check nodes against each other to try and catch nodes that are failing to match transactions properly. One obvious concern is what to do if nodes don't converge on very similar estimates. Wallets will always want to pay the lowest fee possible, so that means they'll always be riding the very edge of what's acceptable, opening up tx propagation to random flaky failures if fee estimates change whilst a transaction is in progress, or if some nodes don't calculate the same estimates as others. If a wallet gets a reject message for a tx that has a fee that are by its own estimates acceptable, what should it do? What if only some nodes report that and others don't? -- 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
Both can be combined into adapting the current generic messages (This payment should become spendable shortly for incoming and This payment has not been transmitted yet for outgoing transactions). What would the new messages say? We need to get away from the notion of senders attaching fees anyway. This is the wrong way around because it’s the recipient who cares about double spending risk, not the sender. That’s why merchants keep running into issues with people attaching zero fees. Of course they attach zero fees. They know they aren’t going to double spend. It’s the merchant who cares about getting the security against that. The UI for sending money should end up dead simple - no mention of fees anywhere, IMO. The UI for receiving money could be a bit more complicated but even then - I think if ordinary people using smartphone wallets are having to think about how quickly they want their transaction to confirm and adjust fees, etc on the receiving side then we’re getting dangerously close to the usability failure zone. Unfortunately we lack the protocol pieces to get the right UI here :( Someone needs to sit down and figure out what the UI *should* look like, in the ideal world, and then work backwards to figure out what needs to be done to get us there. For outgoing transactions, if it is very clear that they're never going to be confirmed, I'd like to see a Revoke button. Disagree. There should never be any cases in which a transaction doesn’t confirm. Period. I know there have been bugs with bitcoinj that could cause this in the past, but they were bugs and they got fixed/will get fixed. Settlement failure is just unacceptable and building a UI around the possibility will just encourage people to think of it as normal, when it should not be so. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic 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 12/01/2013 06:19 PM, Mike Hearn wrote: Both can be combined into adapting the current generic messages (This payment should become spendable shortly for incoming and This payment has not been transmitted yet for outgoing transactions). What would the new messages say? Well, for starters I'd suggest something like This payment did not become spendable since xxx minutes. Check with the sender if s/he paid the Bitcoin network fee. Check if your internet connection is working properly. (incoming) This payment still has not been transmitted. Check if your internet connection is working properly. (outgoing) We need to get away from the notion of senders attaching fees anyway. This is the wrong way around because it’s the recipient who cares about double spending risk, not the sender. That’s why merchants keep running into issues with people attaching zero fees. Of course they attach zero fees. They know they aren’t going to double spend. It’s the merchant who cares about getting the security against that. Guess you're right. But as you said, we're not there yet. The UI for sending money should end up dead simple - no mention of fees anywhere, IMO. Agreed, if the sender does not need to pay a fee any more. On the receiving side it of course needs to be mentioned. (Or the other way round, as of today.) Unfortunately we lack the protocol pieces to get the right UI here :( Someone needs to sit down and figure out what the UI *should* look like, in the ideal world, and then work backwards to figure out what needs to be done to get us there. (The ideal world doesn't need a UI for money.) For outgoing transactions, if it is very clear that they're never going to be confirmed, I'd like to see a Revoke button. Disagree. There should never be any cases in which a transaction doesn’t confirm. Period. I know there have been bugs with bitcoinj that could cause this in the past, but they were bugs and they got fixed/will get fixed. Settlement failure is just unacceptable and building a UI around the possibility will just encourage people to think of it as normal, when it should not be so. I fully understand your point of view. However, its not the reality currently. (Hopefully it is, after the fixes to bitcoinj.) -- 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
This payment did not become spendable since xxx minutes. Check with the sender if s/he paid the Bitcoin network fee. Check if your internet connection is working properly. (incoming) That seems reasonable. The other message should be implementable today, I think? If numBroadcastPeers 0 post 0.10.3 then you know the tx made it out to the internet. Unfortunately if nodes start to diverge a lot in terms of what they will accept, then “transmitted” is no longer a clean binary yes/no thing. Guess we’ll have to jump that hurdle when we come to it. Guess you're right. But as you said, we're not there yet. The payment protocol at least would need some notion of fee, or possibly (better?) the ability for a recipient to specify some inputs as well as some outputs. Originally I think we were hoping for child-pays-for-parent. I guess that needs someone to sit down and focus on it for a while, assuming we still think that’s a good idea. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic 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 Sun, Dec 01, 2013 at 06:19:14PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote: Both can be combined into adapting the current generic messages (This payment should become spendable shortly for incoming and This payment has not been transmitted yet for outgoing transactions). What would the new messages say? We need to get away from the notion of senders attaching fees anyway. This is the wrong way around because it’s the recipient who cares about double spending risk, not the sender. That’s why merchants keep running into issues with people attaching zero fees. Of course they attach zero fees. They know they aren’t going to double spend. It’s the merchant who cares about getting the security against that. The UI for sending money should end up dead simple - no mention of fees anywhere, IMO. The UI for receiving money could be a bit more complicated but even then - I think if ordinary people using smartphone wallets are having to think about how quickly they want their transaction to confirm and adjust fees, etc on the receiving side then we’re getting dangerously close to the usability failure zone. Unfortunately we lack the protocol pieces to get the right UI here :( Someone needs to sit down and figure out what the UI *should* look like, in the ideal world, and then work backwards to figure out what needs to be done to get us there. For outgoing transactions, if it is very clear that they're never going to be confirmed, I'd like to see a Revoke button. Disagree. There should never be any cases in which a transaction doesn’t confirm. Period. I know there have been bugs with bitcoinj that could cause this in the past, but they were bugs and they got fixed/will get fixed. Settlement failure is just unacceptable and building a UI around the possibility will just encourage people to think of it as normal, when it should not be so. Bitcoin is and always will be limited in capacity - transactions may not confirm in a reasonable about of time because of high-demand and/or DoS attacks. Giving senders and/or receivers the ability to increase fees after the fact is the only way you'll ever be able to deal with these situations. Of course, in those situations revoke isn't going to be 100% reliable until the txins get spent elsewhere, but that just indicates the UI problem is around that kind of functionality is subtle. re: merchants paying tx fees, child-pays-for-parent is inefficient, and micropayments direct to miners isn't implemented. (though I did write up a rough sketch of how to do that in a decentralized fashion on #bitcoin-dev) Propose something concrete. -- '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
Bitcoin is and always will be limited in capacity - transactions may not confirm in a reasonable about of time because of high-demand and/or DoS attacks. I agree in the general case, but I was talking about the mobile wallet case specifically (i.e. people who are sending money between themselves or making small purchases of physical things). I think Bitcoin should be able to scale to handle these sorts of ordinary every-day transactions. Where I’d expect to see transactions falling off the edge is in more specialised cases like very small single micropayments, or “optional” internal transactions like mixing/re/defragmentation of wallets that don’t correspond to an actual payment. Those sorts of transactions would I guess be the first to go when faced with a sudden capacity crunch, but they wouldn’t show up in a mobile wallet UI anyway. re: merchants paying tx fees, child-pays-for-parent is inefficient I know the existing code is, but is that fundamentally the case or just how the code has been written? I haven’t looked at this issue much but I know you’ve worked on it, so I’m curious to learn about why it’s inefficient and whether there are any fixes possible. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic 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 Sun, Dec 01, 2013 at 07:18:07PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote: Bitcoin is and always will be limited in capacity - transactions may not confirm in a reasonable about of time because of high-demand and/or DoS attacks. I agree in the general case, but I was talking about the mobile wallet case specifically (i.e. people who are sending money between themselves or making small purchases of physical things). I think Bitcoin should be able to scale to handle these sorts of ordinary every-day transactions. Where I’d expect to see transactions falling off the edge is in more specialised cases like very small single micropayments, or “optional” internal transactions like mixing/re/defragmentation of wallets that don’t correspond to an actual payment. Those sorts of transactions would I guess be the first to go when faced with a sudden capacity crunch, but they wouldn’t show up in a mobile wallet UI anyway. Maybe, maybe not. We have no idea what fees will be because the system's entire capacity is, and always will be, limited. That's just how fundementally unscalable systems with huge global state work. What demand will be for that limited capacity is unknown. re: merchants paying tx fees, child-pays-for-parent is inefficient I know the existing code is, but is that fundamentally the case or just how the code has been written? I haven’t looked at this issue much but I know you’ve worked on it, so I’m curious to learn about why it’s inefficient and whether there are any fixes possible. No, Luke's existing code uses good algorithms with O(n) scaling for n transactions. The inefficiency is needing a second transaction, bloating the blockchain and driving up fees. -- '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