[pre-alpha] new version of transaction fee checker

[mocacinno]

The main functionality of my website (mocacinno.com) was written back in 2017. IIRC, i was running core version ~0.12~ish (i don't update my node all that often).
Since then, loads has happened in our ecosystem... And my "usefull" tools became outdated and no longer functional.
I've been thinking about rewriting my site, but over the years so many things were "added on".... So i needed a radical new way of working, changing just a little bit won't do, it needs to rewritten completely and all the sub-tools need to be moved manually...

I'm currently in the process of rewriting the TOOLS section of my site in go... I'm thinking about using a small footprint webserver in go next to my main webserver, i'll then redirect all requests going to my tools to said go daemon. That way i can fix my tools while i'm in the process of thinking about how to move all that data without breaking stuff.

Because of the current state of the mempool, i'm releasing the first tool, eventough it's currently in pre-pre-pre-alpha stage.

http://193.70.78.148:8081/page/feechecker => Non-TLS had no added value, so i no longer run a service on this port, use the TLS version instead
TLS version => https://www2.mocacinno.com:8082/page/feechecker

With this tool, you can check wether or not your transaction is in my mempool AND if you added a sufficient fee. You can POST the txid directly to https://www2.mocacinno.com:8082/page/feechecker if you don't want to use the form.

Bug reports are welcome BUT you'll have to realise this is pre-pre-pre alpha...
my immediate TO-DO list:

• I'll defenately add TLS (https)
• input sanitation
• fix the menu... At the moment, clicking any link other than "using the feechecker tool" will send you on a wild goose-chase over one of my many ip's and open ports... Also, images and layout WILL break if you do something else than testing the feechecker
• add more functionality

Also, this is not a linux service (yet). If it crashes, it crashes and it'll only start when I start it again... When i go to a beta phase, i'll make sure the service restarts if it crashes

In case you want to fix bugs yourself (or steal my code) => https://github.com/mocacinno/mocacinno.com

EDIT: just a little sidenote: i'll be gone during the weekend, i'll be back on monday morning to read potential bug reports

[BitcoinGirl.Club]

http://193.70.78.148:8081/page/feechecker

In this crisis time (high fees I mean) this will be a great tool for bitcoiners. By the way this is my first time visiting your site mocacinno.com. I wonder how much traffic you get a month? It's informative after all.

[mocacinno]

--snip--
In this crisis time (high fees I mean) this will be a great tool for bitcoiners. By the way this is my first time visiting your site mocacinno.com. I wonder how much traffic you get a month? It's informative after all.

Good question... I honestly never look at my server stats... Eventough i'm strongly against cloudflare, i have enabled cloudflare on my main domain a long time ago (it's not like i handle really privacy-centric things anyway) and those guys say it's about ~400 uniques/day, eventough many go to my blog (which also contains outdated info... I haven't created a single post in a long, long time)

BTW: the TLS version is live @: https://www2.mocacinno.com:8082/

[bitmover]

Because of the current state of the mempool, i'm releasing the first tool, eventough it's currently in pre-pre-pre-alpha stage.

http://193.70.78.148:8081/page/feechecker
TLS version => https://www2.mocacinno.com:8082/page/feechecker

With this tool, you can check wether or not your transaction is in my mempool AND if you added a sufficient fee. You can POST the txid directly to http://193.70.78.148:8081/page/feechecker if you don't want to use the form.

Bug reports are welcome BUT you'll have to realise this is pre-pre-pre alpha...
my immediate TO-DO list:

• I'll defenately add TLS (https)
• input sanitation
• fix the menu... At the moment, clicking any link other than "using the feechecker tool" will send you on a wild goose-chase over one of my many ip's and open ports... Also, images and layout WILL break if you do something else than testing the feechecker
• add more functionality

Also, this is not a linux service (yet). If it crashes, it crashes and it'll only start when I start it again... When i go to a beta phase, i'll make sure the service restarts if it crashes

In case you want to fix bugs yourself (or steal my code) => https://github.com/mocacinno/mocacinno.com

EDIT: just a little sidenote: i'll be gone during the weekend, i'll be back on monday morning to read potential bug reports

Good job mocacinno. I did  something similar myself ("Plot your tx in the mempool"), but I don't release anything new for some time...

I check ed your tool and I found some errors. Where are you getting mempool data from? Your own node?

I used transactions from https://blockstream.info/tx/recent and I received the following message:

http://193.70.78.148:8081/page/feechecker
1346edf44c5e1a3f6bd571db5225f7c606cdc4cecf6b5363af2ef9bdddc58878 not found in my mempool

This transaction is a 96.3 sat/vB tx, so it should be in your mempool.

After 2 tries, I found 2 that worked in a row. So I think I was just unlucky.

[SFR10]

@mocacinno
Finally, another useful tool ^{[by you]}
I think there might be something that's affecting the results since I got inconsistent results:

• I used a random unconfirmed TX and got the following results ^{[a bit similar to bitmover but I only used a "single" transaction]}:
  
  • Direct: Screenshot
  • TLS: Screenshot

Also, images and layout WILL break if you do something else than testing the feechecker

I didn't do anything else apart from the feecheker but it still affected an image ^{[above SS]}.
^{- I was using the Chrome browser.}

[mocacinno]

@bitmover and @SFR10
Thank you both for testing

@bitmover : I'm using my own node, but i might have to edit my config so i keep more transactions in my mempool....
As for the problem shown by SFR10: i have no idear yet... I'm back @ the office on monday morning, and i'll immediately have a look at this when i arrive. Theoretically, nothing was changed between the two versions of the tool except adding the certificates to enable TLS... But you know, pre-alpha stuff is not well-tested, so there's probably a bug somewhere.

I'll probably stop the non-SSL version monday morning, there's just no use-case for a non-TLS version that is not covered by the TLS version. The github repo I posted in the OP contains the TLS version anyways, i just compiled the code pre-TLS and started running it for the non-TLS version, then i modified the code and ran it uncompiled for the TLS version.

[Joel_Jantsen]

Oh, I recollect using one of your tools before! Glad, you're still keeping them up! For the transaction fee checker, there is a small layout issue. After your search for a tax, the TX ID gets the overflow and you need to like scroll horizontally to see the entire TX. Not a bug that needs urgent fixing but does makes a UI look a bit wonky.

You should also include a link to your fee estimator on that page so users can properly estimate a fee in their next transactions.

[mocacinno]

In the meantime, based on the feedback in this thread, i've fixed following issues:

• For some reason, i had my node configured with maxmempool=50; mempoolexpiry=2(probably because i was strapped for resources a while ago). Now, i've changed these values to 250Mb, 1000 hours... Should be better this way :-)
• Based on Joel_Jantsen's feedback, i've changed the title of the feechecker page a little bit... The code isn't actively running tough, but it's already present in the github repo

I've also setup redirects from my old site to the new daemon, since the old feechecker didn't work anyways... Data POSTED to feechecker.php is redirected to the new page aswell...

The next couple of days, i'll probably try to fix some of the gui elements, links, layout problems and do a better check of the feechecker...
Once again: if somebody finds any bugs, don't hesistate to let me know!

[bitmover]

Once again: if somebody finds any bugs, don't hesistate to let me know!

mocacinno, I was testing and had the same problem, transaction not found for 089f51417bd80f071df535a3df5ebdda9295dc9ab24756be23b6b8151bfbbcb2, whcih is a 143 sat/vbyte transaction.

It is curious that it showed in https://www2.mocacinno.com:8082/page/feechecker, but not in http://193.70.78.148:8081/page/feechecker


I will make a suggestion about your output. This is the current output, which is a bit repetitive and confusing:

your tx id is 089f51417bd80f071df535a3df5ebdda9295dc9ab24756be23b6b8151bfbbcb2
the optimal fee per vbyte to be ~rather~ sure your tx ends up in the next ~6 blocks is: 141.833 sat/vbyte
your vsize (in vbytes) is 670
your payed a fee of 96382 sats
which boils down to 143 sats/vbyte
your fee is high enough... yeey!!!

You could consolidade the 2nd and the last two lines, as they have the same information.

[mocacinno]

@bitmover: offcource, by the time i looked at the transaction in question, it had 3 confirmations already, so it was pruned from my mempool before i could track down the source of the problem  .

My gut tells me that the previous issues were due to the fact i had ridiculously small settings for my mempool (max 50 Mb, max 2 hours before pruning), and the current issue *might* have been because the transaction was mined between testing the non-TLS and the TLS version??? I'm not sure tough, but like i said: can't test anymore because the transaction ended up in a block before i could have a look at it

I haven't really gotten around to the gui, enduser stuff... But your proposal (to concat the 2nd and the last 2 lines) sounds good... I'll do that when i have some dev-time tomorrow... I'll also try to test a bunch of transactions between the TLS and non-TLS version. The non-TLS version will be stopped pretty soon (there's no added value to be had from running a non-TLS version), but i'd like to be sure the issue with transactions popping up on the TLS version and not on the non-TLS version aren't caused by a bug.

Thanks for testing! It's highly appreciated

By the way, in case more people willing to test pop up: you don't really have to use the form (for now), you can just post the txid directly to https://www2.mocacinno.com:8082/page/feechecker using tools like postman... This makes it easyer to bulk-test or debug

[examplens]

You have another bug there.
When first time clicks on https://www2.mocacinno.com:8082/page/feechecker everything is normal,
but if click again on fee checker through website many, then I had this https://www2.mocacinno.com:8082/page/page/feechecker in my address bar. So for some reason, here is added another string page/ in the address line.
Final result is:

Code:

{"message":"Not Found"}

It seems the same things happened with other menu items, although few items do not work even when deleted duplicated page/.

[shield132]

Nice, but I sugges you to work on the UI part. Make diagrams and charts to interact with people more easily and make it look attractive. For example, have a look at live.blockcypher.com <-- They have "Confidence" and "Miner Preference" section with round cycle that fills according to the statistics. It's nicer for eyes than reading numbers alone.

Also, seems your website is a little bit slow in including of transactions. I checked some last minute transactions that were available on blockchain.com and blockcypher.com and they appeared on your website later.

[Findingnemo]

Final result is:

Code:

{"message":"Not Found"}

It seems the same things happened with other menu items, although few items do not work even when deleted duplicated page/.

I can confirm it from my end as well!


Nice tool though and those words are interesting to read for me and I checked few random TXs from mempool with low and high fee used.

Is it possible to add any kind of notification tool when fee reaches certain range? It will be helpful to consolidate smaller inputs from time to time because that feature is not available fee tracking sites.

[mocacinno]

Thanks for testing

I'm not going to reply to each individual test, but in general, i can tell you that the GUI problems are known and on my to-do list.... They'll get partially fixed in the next release  which i'll roll out later today or tomorrow. I expect them all to be fixed once i roll out an actual beta release (we're still in pre-alpha at the moment)
As for the rest: i've read all your replies with great care, and i've seen a couple of features that are defenately doable, so i'll add them to my to-do list.