Bitcoin Forum

I do sell stuff for Bitcoin. Usually it works normal. But quite often I see buyers who order product but send less amount. It seems Bitcoin fee was deducted from that amount. Obviously merchant script does not trigger and waits for more bitcoins to arrive.

I wonder what insane Bitcoin client does such thing? May be I can post a notice warning such Bitcoin client users, that they won't get ordered stuff if not full amount arrived.

Have you asked your customers?  It would be a good thing to know and they likely are the only ones who are going to know for sure.

Customers are mostly anonymous. In this particular business model I don't have to have contact to the customer to deliver product.

It's likely they're withdrawing from an exchange or other e-wallet that has a withdrawal fee in addition to the transaction fee. People need to either 1) stop using goddamn sites that charge withdrawal fees or 2) overbuy BTC on exchanges with withdrawal fees, withdraw to their personal wallet, then send from there, using the appropriate TX fee.

Have you checked the transactions to see if there is a common web wallet you can locate? If non-web, there aren't many options to test..

I am fairly certain no desktop client deducts miner fees from the amount sent.  MtGox charges 10x the min fee for withdraws but it is taken from account balance not the amount sent.  I am fairly certain bitstamp and coinbase do the same.    So it probably is some web wallet or smaller exchange.  Not sure why people use exchange accounts as a spending wallet but they do.    I agree with the OP it is an utterly stupid decision.  I mean it break even "common sense".  If I use my bank account to do a transfer, bill pay, or even bank wire there may be a fee but the fee is never deducted from the amount being sent.  It would cause all kinds unnecessary chaos, support calls, and upset customers in the traditional finance world as well.

If any user (or any service, exchange, web-wallet, etc) can confirm an instance where a tx fee, or withdraw fee was deducted from the amount sent please post an example as someone needs to beat that developer over the head with a book on software design.

It is definitely not withdrawal fee. Blockchain shows following information:

Output X BTC -- Fee: 0.0001 BTC -- Input (X-0.0001) BTC

Where X is contractual price of the product.

just-dice

I agree, I was trying to get OP to limit the variables with more information.  It is definitely stupid, but we still can't tell where it is coming from.  :-)

Maybe they're using some mixer to be anonymous and aren't taking the fee into account.

Anonymity here is not important point. It came as a side effect. There are no legal issues with the stuff I sell. Just personally I hate when I buy digital product they ask my home address. What for? So when I sell myself I ask only those details which I really need.

Just today I got contact and chased one of the buyer with BTC transferred incomplete. He said he used BTC-e for payment.

Exactly.

Unless we take care of these small issues, BTC will never get popular with online merchants.

I'm not sure how "we can take care of" exchange operators being arseholes.

BTC-e clearly states how much is fee and how much is actually transferred.

Simple user error.

Nothing is ever that "simple".  Sites should strive to make things transparent.  It is a better/cleaner interface to ask the user the amount they want to withdraw and then add the fee to that and show the user the total.

As an example billpay for consumers is often free, but billpay for businesses is often a charge.  I think we pay $0.20 or something like that.  I don't have to make sure to add $0.20 to the amount of the billpay because the bank will deduct it.  The bank pays what I ask them to pay, and they deduct the $0.20 from the account balance.

I mean if you leave it all on users and say "user error" then why even have websites.  Give users instructions and have them manually construct the TCP/IP packets to communicate with the service.  Ok I wasn't being serious on that one but you get the point.

I'm not sure if you are familiar with the BTC-e withdraw form. It says "You will receive:". That's the amount the entered address will receive. If the amount in there is not the amount that the address is supposed to receive, well, then the amount was entered incorrectly. I think some things can be expected of the user.

Leave out the transfer fee deduction and you have users complaining of being ripped off.

Is there an exchange or wallet that charge no transfer fee to move bitcoins?

I'd like to know  ???

Consider making your merchant script more 'smart'! Despite the inability (and sometimes intention) of customers to send proper payments, you should think of how much is missing (total percentage) and is it worth the hassle with the delayed and pending order.

Compare it e.g. to bastards from hell PayPal. They deduct a noticeable percentage as fee. If the percentage you miss is below that, don't care and swallow it. At least with Bitcoins noone can freeze your account or charge back the payment. That alone is worth it over fu***** PayPal.

I am familiar with the form.


Nobody said anything about hiding the fee.


User enters the amount to send, site reports the rest.  Pretty simple concept.

You missed whole point. Nobody here against Bitcoin fees in common. But many people (and scripts) confused when sender sends say 1 BTC, but receiver gets 0.999 BTC. Deducting fee from transferred amount is bad!

Nothing wrong with Paypal. They may deduct fees but they do accurately inform your script that payment arrived in full and allow script to trigger.

But BTC-e does stupid things confusing people and scripts.

I already do my leaving being a Bitcoin merchant. You comment is senseless.

Simple fact that this BTC-e withdrawal brings a lot of pros and cons arguments means that it is designed not well. If it be good nobody will rise any questions about it. Like say nobody will argue with their login form.

Yes so it is "user" error...that doesn't help this guy and other businesses who might take BTC.  A lot of people are rather dumb and they can't handle anything but the simplest payment process.

Damn you BTC-e!

https://i.imgur.com/N2UvD7W.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/Qt6zyrM.jpg

It is likely from some kind of exchange or pool that allows for customers to withdraw a certain amount to a certain address but will not send the entire amount.

Either that or the OP's customers do not understand that the miner's fee is the responsibility of the sender. Considering that the fee averages ~$0.06 per TX now I would really not worry about it that much unless your average TX is very small.

No one client argued that it was his responsibility. They just said: "Ah! I didn't noticed that!".

That what I demand make it noticeable! Not only in the moment of payment but in historical view too. Repeat it every time transaction mentioned. It is simple good practice method.

I do merchant operations with Bitcoins for 7 years now. And such problem regularly happens only and only with BTC-e clients. Doesn't it give any hint that something wrong in BTC-e?

As said above since the fee is so small presently for most transactions the merchant should just absorb the TX fee as a cost of doing business. This would likely be less then accepting any other form of payment.

+1 ... when i send to a QR-code, a sum ... the fees is added after (the merchand receive the exact amount that it has displayed in QR-code).

merchand : 0,1BTC to pay = QR-Code
me : scan QR-code
merchand : receive 0,1BTC
me : -0,1001BTC (0,1BTC+Fees of 0,0001BTC)

What do you mean, so they don't send you the full amount, because the client deducts a transaction fee? Man, that's messed up!!! That's not the way it should work!! Could it be that those people are just trying to scam you???

or just pound it into people minds to keep their coin on their computer based wallet and put high amounts in cold storage and just keep enough in their wallet to buy everyday things. I only keep about 1 coin in my hot wallet and everything else is in cold storage, and if i need to buy something, I usually go to coinbase to purchase the small amount of coin that is needed.

But storing your coin on places like btc-e is just bad business. one, you dont have control over the private key, and two, you dont have control over the private key, lol....

You must be mistaken.

It was probably sent from a wallet that is meant to withdraw coins to your personal wallet (like how ghash taxes the TX fee when you manually withdraw from your pool account).

Yes I am. It must be read 4 years.

Actually I do absorb fees for those mistaken transactions I describe here. But in common your proposal is nonce. Fee amount is not fixed, defined by free will of a sender. If it senders will then he/she must absorb it. Just pure common sense. What if sender transfer merchant 1 BTC with 0.5 BTC fee included. Would you absorb it being a merchant?

If the fee is above the standard amount per kb (even 3x the standard amount at current levels) and the total fee is less then $0.50 then you should almost certainly absorb the fee. If the buyer would send some crazy amount for a fee (.5 in your example, or even .05) then I would reject the transaction and have the buyer resend the proper amount. A .05 fee would come out to roughly $30 which at this point is much more then the cost of doing business. You are correct in saying that the fee is set by the sender, but if the fee is reasonable then you should accept it.

If you owned a physical store would you not sell a $359.95 widget to a customer because they were short $0.25 when it cost you $200 to make the widget including advertising and all other costs?

I don't know about widgets. I sell intangible goods which all handled automatically. And if payment is not in full the system waits for while and then drops it as being unpaid. I even not aware what is going on with every single purchase as they are automatic. In couple days client will call or write in search of his purchase.

Stop that bullshit about merchant fee absorption. There is nothing about saving costs. The system already designed that payee handles fees, no need to break this behavior and make merchant part even more complicated or even unpredictable.

I see a lot of sites that when you try to withdraw your bitcoin they deduct the fee and make you pay it. I guess someone has to pay it so if you're selling something you should make clear who has to "eat" the fee.

A "widget" is something that is used as a placeholder in accounting and economics classes that takes the place of the good that a company is selling. It is another way of saying your product.

If your system considers a payment to be unpaid if the full amount if not received then what happens to the money that was sent you? I also am pretty sure that you said above (although it could have been someone else) that you accept the short payment.

The point of my above post is the importance of customer service, which is not part of the Bitcoin protocol. If it means that you earn a little bit less from your sale to make your customer happy then you should make a little bit less as the customer will be more likely to buy from you again. It is also about simple economics. The amount in question that you are saying you are being shorted is roughly 6 cents. Any viable business will certainly make more of a profit per sale then this (likely a lot more). If you were to give up a sale because a customer is $0.06 short then you would be giving up your entire profit from that sale for no real reason.

It is not necessary to make clear who has to "eat" the fee. Everybody knows that transferror does and nobody argues that (except weird Mobius). The problem only in BTC-e that they confusingly deduct fee from transferred amount instead charging on top of that (how all other adequate wallets do).

poloniex does this...
always bugs me when ordering a pizza ;)

I would disagree that "everyone" knows that the buyer/sender pays the fee. With most fiat baed payment systems it works the opposite. If you know a little bit about bitcoin then you know the sender pays the fee, but everyone who has bitcoin may not know very much about bitcoin, nor how it works. When you buy something on a website that uses coinbase then coinbase will make it very clear the buyer is responsible for the fee.

I am not saying that the receiver should always "eat" the TX fee, I am saying that if a customer deducts the fee from what they send then receiving $0.06 less then you otherwise would is a very small price to pay to keep the sale moving. If this is something a buyer does multiple times then it would be appropriate to say something to the buyer.

coinbase, cryptsy, blockchain... Almost all "web" wallets?

Agreed deducting fees is a poor model. Customers are going to be inclined to withdraw the amount listed on the payment page; therefore wallets and exchanges should be consistent with the general consensus that fees are added.