Rewording the "fee confirmation" dialog text

Projects
1

I’d like to submit a pull request that improves the wording on the “fee confirmation” dialog that appears when you send coins from your Peerunity wallet. Currently, the text is:

Note: In the above image, the fee is listed for a transaction that hasn’t exceeded 1kB, but if it had, you would see “0.02 PPC” or “0.03 PPC,” etc., in it’s place.

In my opinion, this text doesn’t provide for a good experience, and doesn’t really address what’s going on within the Peercoin network. I’d like to propose an alternative, and check with the Community to see if it’s preferred, and, if there are alternative proposals that others have, to consider those as well. If there is a better way to communicate this to people, I’ll include it in a pull request that I’m going to submit to the Peerunity repo later today:

Here’s my reworked version:

Any time peercoins are sent from one address to another, a Peercoin network fee is added. For this transaction, the fee will be [b]0.01 PPC[/b].

[ Cancel ] [ Agree, and transfer peercoins ]

Any suggestions on ways to improve it?

2

add per kilobyte?
I replaced peercoins with funds but maybe that isnt a good idea, reason was so it is possible to use in other currencies, maybe it should read “for every kilobyte/transaction” if that doesnt confuse more (and i changed sent to transferred, removed the from one address to another)

Any time funds are transferred, a network fee is added for every kilobyte. For this transaction, the fee will be 0.01 PPC.

[ Cancel ] [ Agree, and transfer peercoins ]

3

yes, the current dialogue is confusing, as peercoin min fee is 0.01.

Ideally, the fee calculation should be along side on the same page with the amount to send, and dynamically calculated when user changes the sending amount, so that user can adjust the amount to minimize fee, kinda like coin control in bitcoin 0.9.

or if we don’t want to make too much changes, just changing the wording is good enough.

4

[quote=“romerun, post:3, topic:2403”]yes, the current dialogue is confusing, as peercoin min fee is 0.01.

Ideally, the fee calculation should be along side on the same page with the amount to send, and dynamically calculated when user changes the sending amount, so that user can adjust the amount to minimize fee, kinda like coin control in bitcoin 0.9.

or if we don’t want to make too much changes, just changing the wording is good enough.[/quote]

I agree, that is ideal. I’d prefer to update the interface so that the dialog isn’t needed, but for this minor fix, I didn’t want to jump into a systemic change, and rather, just address the label, initially.

add per kilobyte? I replaced peercoins with funds but maybe that isnt a good idea, reason was so it is possible to use in other currencies, maybe it should read "for every kilobyte/transaction" if that doesnt confuse more (and i changed sent to transferred, removed the from one address to another)

Here’s how my thought process went when I picked the wording that I originally came up with (and why I didn’t add in certain information):

Any time peercoins are sent from one address to another,[...]

First, I wanted to inform the user that this was a transaction that always was incurred, rather than something that is being applied because of something that they are doing differently on that specific transaction. I also wanted to educate the viewer that the transaction fee applies any time that peercoins are sent from one address to another address (between wallets, or within the same wallet).

Because the Peerunity application only deals with peercoins at this point, I didn’t go with the generic “funds” or “coins,” but kept “peercoins”.

[...] a Peercoin network fee is added.

This was intended to convey that the fee is a Peercoin network charge, and not something that the wallet application developers are keeping for themselves. I’m sure this could be conveyed in a more direct way, but I tried a bunch of variations and nothing I wrote made it any clearer; rather, each variation seemed like I was trying to explain something technical.

For this transaction, the fee will be 0.01 PPC.

This sentence is important, but it’s also not totally complete (as written). We know the size of the transaction is important – and depending on that size, modifies the fee that is charged – but trying to simply explain what that means to the person sending the peercoins is very difficult. In fact, even though I can explain to you why one transaction is “heavier” than another (due to the number of input transactions used to fund the output transaction), it’s not something that is straight-forward to describe because of the way that the application’s standard coin-control works.

We could certainly indicate in the dialog that the transaction is “0.1456 kB” in size, and that it will cost “0.01 PPC” to transfer, but what does that really mean to the person viewing the dialog? It’s not something that they can control* and it’s not something that is easily explainable within the space available within the dialog. Perhaps we could include a tooltip and “?” icon to help explain why a given transaction costs 0.02 PPC vs. the standard 0.01 PPC, but again, I didn’t want to try to fit too much information into the dialog and scare someone off.

[ Cancel ] [ Agree, and transfer peercoins ]

The original dialog asked a question “Do you want to pay the fee?” and then provided “Cancel” and “Yes” as the options. When I sat down to think about the action button labels, I tried to turn the whole dialog into the “question” that needed a response (“That’s cool, I understand that there will be a fee, and go ahead and send the coins that I asked you to…” or “Oh, I didn’t realize that…no, let’s cancel this transaction…”). I’m open to suggestions, if there are button labels that others believe work better.

* Coin control has some effect, and helps for advanced users, but it still doesn’t give you extremely granular control to only pick inputs that, when combined into an output, will always result in a fee of 0.01 PPC.

5

Ben

I take it that in your original text, the reference to the transaction “being over the size limit” is a red herring - since a fee is payable on all tranactions with peercoin? If so, it is quite right to take it out

With regards to your revised text:

“Any time” is a little colloquial - how about “Each time”

I think there is ambiguity about “fee is added”, as some people will say “fee is deducted”. Also, who pays the fee - the receiver (i.e. the fee is taken from the amount sent), or the sender (i.e. the fee is taken from the sender’s account, so the amount sent is not affected)? This needs to be clear because, if the sender intends the recipient to get 1 ppc, he won’t want the recipient to get only 0.99ppc.

Assuming the fee is paid by the sender, how about this wording:

“Each time peercoins are sent from one address to another, a Peercoin network fee is payable by the sender. For this transaction, the fee will be 0.01 PPC”

If you want to be ultra-clear, you could add, “and will be in addition to the amount sent”

Assuming the fee is paid by the receiver, how about:

“Each time peercoins are sent from one address to another, a Peercoin network fee is payable. For this transaction, the fee will be 0.01 PPC, and will be deducted from the amount sent”

Another point: in your previous wording, there is a sentence that explains the purpose of the fee (about nodes, etc.) This is a useful sentence to have, yet it will become repetitive to regular users. If the option exists, you could install a little question mark which, when a cursor is hovered over it, products a little pop up with the explanation

6

I agree that kilobytes should be kept out of the wording for now (but also that, in due course, tip boxes could be added to provide the extra information for those that want to know)

7

Thanks for the feedback, Robert.

Another point: in your previous wording, there is a sentence that explains the purpose of the fee (about nodes, etc.) This is a useful sentence to have, yet it will become repetitive to regular users.

I left that sentence out because it isn’t true, in the case of Peercoin. From what I can tell, that was language left over from the port of Bitcoin to Peercoin. Nodes aren’t compensated with Peercoin network fees. The portion about “supporting the network” is true, but I could not figure out a way to word it to clearly state that the reason that the fixed fee exists is to prevent DDoS attacks via masses of “free” transactions, and to promote the health of the network by acting as a hedge against mine/mint reward inflation.

8

I thought we’d get better visibility if I split the discussion about normalizing the transaction fee into it’s own topic. Here’s the link to that in the Peercoin> Development board: http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2852.0

9

No doubt the Transaction Fee is one of the larger rubs held against Peercoin. In general people hate fees. Even though many bitcoin exchanges charge fees they always try to hide it. If you want to send 1.00000000 BTC then they will send 1.00000000 and NOT 0.999000, or whatever, but they will charge your account that little bit more in the absolutely least observable way possible, without being actually fraudulent :frowning:

Everytime Peercoin is transferred a network regulating and balancing fee is assessed. For this transfer this will be 0.01 PPC.

I wish we could somehow say how much that is in U.S. Dollars. Like: This is currently equivalent in U.S. Dollars to about ~2 cents.

When I convert and think that: well… hahahahaha!!! What am I worrying about??? TWO CENTS!!! hahahahahaha :wink: That’s nothing!!!

10

Note that the curious user can turn on coin control and hover the cursor over the “byte” label and read from the pop up bubble about transaction size and fee.

If possible I suggest minimize mentioning of specific coin name because it’s extra work and potential error spots for translators.