Suggest notation change in bitcoin clients

[realnowhereman]

Rather than "unconfirmed"; which is a word that has meaning only to people who are familiar with bitcoin technology, how about doing this instead when displaying the balance in bitcoin clients:

Code:

Cleared balance: 17.300
+ uncleared deposits: 2.900
- uncleared withdrawals: 5.100
= Uncleared balance: 15.000

"Uncleared" is a much more familiar concept to mortals.

Similarly transactions with zero confirmations would show as "uncleared".

I'm not sure that I've picked the right way around though; it may be clearer for people to see this:

Code:

Uncleared balance: 15.000
+ uncleared withdrawals: 5.100
- uncleared deposits: 2.9
= cleared balance: 17.300

I think the uncleared balance is actually the important one (as we expect that to become the true balance), so it depends whether people think that should be at the top (maybe in a bigger font) or at the bottom.

[FreeMoney]

Does uncleared usually mean that you cannot spend the money? Because you can technically spend 0/unc, but not in the GUI and you can spend 1/unc. Maybe it should just say 0 confirmations, 1 confirmation ... 6 confirmed, 7 confirmed....

As it is it seems like there is something magical about 6 when there is not.

[realnowhereman]

Does uncleared usually mean that you cannot spend the money? Because you can technically spend 0/unc, but not in the GUI and you can spend 1/unc. Maybe it should just say 0 confirmations, 1 confirmation ... 6 confirmed, 7 confirmed....

As it is it seems like there is something magical about 6 when there is not.

Well whatever the GUI decides at the moment.  Uncleared deposits would be money you've received but can't spend yet.  Uncleared withdrawals is money you've already spent, but hasn't been received by the other party yet -- a decent client will prevent double spending attempts by stopping you from using that as well.

In other words, your cleared balance is what you have available to spend right now; and your uncleared balance is what you could expect to have available tomorrow (or whatever the clearing time is).

The uncleared bits can't say anything about confirmation count because some uncleared funds could have 2 confirmations some could have 3, some could have 4...