Alternative way of choosing fees when building transactions

[tomunchained]

Currently, if someone wants a precise fee (X satoshis exactly), while building the transaction the only way to accomplish this is to fiddle with the fee rate using trial-and-error until the precise fee is achieved (e.g. changing the fee rate from 4 sat/vb, to 5, to 4.5, to 4.6, to 4.55, etc).

It would be nice to be be able to enter EITHER a fee rate OR a specific fee in satoshis, and changes to one will cause the other to automatically recalculate.

[Legend101Zz]

@tomunchained that looks like a quick fix to me ... just wanted to check with @bucko13 if there was any reason it was not done earlier , else I'll go ahead and raise a PR for this :)

[bucko13]

The only thing I can think is that you can't know the rate which is what miners care about until after coin selection. So there might be some complexity around that.

[Legend101Zz]

The only thing I can think of is that you can’t really know the effective fee rate — which is what miners care about — until after coin selection, so there may be some complexity there.

That makes sense. What I was thinking, though, is from a user-experience perspective: as a user, I can already tweak inputs, and if the total ends up being too high or too low, the UI asks me to adjust the amount accordingly.

Maybe we can apply a similar pattern to fees as well. For example, let the user adjust things, and if the resulting package fee rate changes, we surface that and ask them to confirm or tweak the fee rate again. Yes, that does mean the fee rate might shift after coin selection, but that already happens implicitly today.

Also, for fee rates, we already start with the current network rates by default, right? So in most cases, the initial value should be sane, and any adjustment would be more of an explicit, user-driven correction rather than a surprise.

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[tomunchained]

we surface that and ask them to confirm or tweak the fee rate again

Technically a separate issue, but when I've worked with Caravan users they find the little grey "+" or "-" sign to not be intuitive as what needs to be clicked to recalculate the transaction. It doesn't stand out, and it isn't clear what the button actually does at first glance. It would be an improvement to clarify this somehow, such as replacing it with a blue button that says "recalculate" or "rebalance" etc.

[Legend101Zz]

we surface that and ask them to confirm or tweak the fee rate again

Technically a separate issue, but when I've worked with Caravan users they find the little grey "+" or "-" sign to not be intuitive as what needs to be clicked to recalculate the transaction. It doesn't stand out, and it isn't clear what the button actually does at first glance. It would be an improvement to clarify this somehow, such as replacing it with a blue button that says "recalculate" or "rebalance" etc.

Sure thanks , lets take both these things as part of the enhancement and let me come back to you with something good :)

[bucko13]

Yeah it could work. There will probably be some hidden complexity, but in some ways it's also easier since to get to the fee amount you just need to subtract from the change. The challenges might lie around what happens if the change gets too small. Then you add a new input (in auto select) and then readjust the the change to correspond.

One thing that might be neat but might be too big to do for now is to use the caravan-transactions package to do this coordinating and build up the template from that. Just a half-baked brainstorm though so not a requirement.

[Legend101Zz]

@bucko13 @tomunchained how does this look

also @bucko13 does it make sense for now to only add this adjustable fees feature only for the manual mode , or do we want for both ?

[tomunchained]

I really like the new rebalance button and the option to target a specific fee.

My suggested improvements:

• For the fee rate, limit the number of decimal places to 2
• I'd position in the new "estimated fees" section closer to the "fee rate" section, so that they are visually connected to each other. I think that could also allow us to get rid of the "effective rate" subtext, because the user would see the effective fee rate in the "fee rate" section (avoiding repetitive info).

[Legend101Zz]

I really like the new rebalance button and the option to target a specific fee.

My suggested improvements:

• For the fee rate, limit the number of decimal places to 2
• I'd position in the new "estimated fees" section closer to the "fee rate" section, so that they are visually connected to each other. I think that could also allow us to get rid of the "effective rate" subtext, because the user would see the effective fee rate in the "fee rate" section (avoiding repetitive info).

Thanks for the feedback , let me get the changes done for this :)

[Legend101Zz]

@bucko13 @tomunchained so I was going through your reviews on the UI and how mentioned that to user's the UI feels a bit unintuitive , like the rebalance button and formatting , so I took a dig at it and came up with this new UI , how does it look to you guys or should I make it go back to as it was :)

[tomunchained]

I really like this separation into distinct sections, much cleaner IMO! What does the "Estimate" button do?

[Legend101Zz]

Ahh sorry for the late reply ( again my GH notifications don't seem to be working :( ... )

Estimate is just for getting the current network rates 😅